


leave your bones

by fitzefitcher



Series: one bright moment [2]
Category: Warcraft - All Media Types, World of Warcraft
Genre: Alternate Universe - Death Knights, Blood and Gore, Character Death, Depression, F/M, Feral Behavior, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Mind Control, Mind Games, POV Second Person, POV Third Person, Temporary Character Death, gratuitous use of fenrir metaphors, mentions of abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-04
Updated: 2015-06-03
Packaged: 2018-03-05 07:46:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 55,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3111791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fitzefitcher/pseuds/fitzefitcher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When you died, you didn’t run from it. You didn’t get to.</p><p>Jaina dies in the Halls of Reflection.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

When you died, you didn’t run from it. You didn’t get to.

You didn’t expect this, no; you were foolish enough to believe that it wouldn’t happen, that you would live through this, even as the cause of your death stared you down for all of a moment before gutting you on a sword, and all you can think of is Thrall begging you not to leave, a wild desperation pulling him tight at the seams, hands forcibly stilled on your shoulders and not around your wrists. This image is what fills your head as your blood drips down your cooling body.

The mission had started off well enough, yes, you and a few other volunteers apprehensively making your way through the halls of the citadel, somehow unnoticed long enough for you to reach the cursed blade that would take your life not minutes later. It is when you get slightly too close that the Lich King deems to finally take notice of you, a great pair of doors flying open on the other side of the room, and the blade leaps into his hands right as you go to touch it. He stalks back from whence he came, and stupidly, stupidly you run after him. You follow him into another room at the end of the hallway where he stands waiting for you, and you are foolish enough to think that Arthas is still in there, somehow, that you can talk some sense into him, that this whole thing has been one big misunderstanding, and you continue to think this as he turns around and you cannot recognize the face of the figure before you.

You don’t even get a single word in before Frostmourne finds your stomach and thrusts upward into your ribs, your vision going black, and your senses going numb.

\---

Jaina’s death is a short-lived solace.  
  
When the Lich King pulls the shroud of sleep from her, so soon after smothering her with it, it is a tearing that mars her soul, ripped screaming from the aether and sealed back into her husk of a body. It is not a gentle thing, what her new master does to bring her back, and really she shouldn’t be surprised; he was not gentle when he delivered her death- Frostmourne plunged into her then-living flesh, below the ribs and halfway down the blade as she stares into the face of the man she once loved and finds instead an omnivorous predator, a devourer of all things. It confirms again that she was stupid to run off. It confirms that Thrall was right, that she should have listened to him when he pulled her aside and tried to convince her not to go. Arthas no longer existed, the intrusive presence in her mind is not him, not entirely; a dark and ominous thing waiting for her beneath the manic rage of what was once Arthas with a frightening intelligence lurking like an iceberg. But now she is too cold to feel any sort of sorrow, an icy rage clutching at her lungs, her heart, her new master crushing everything so fiercely there is room for little else.

With the frost that now coats her tattered robes, her arms, and her fingers she is made to attack the forces that have made their base in the citadel’s entrance, within hours of her resurrection. And call blizzards upon them she does, raining shards of ice as big as daggers until they retreat. When they clear out, suddenly and not without injury, both Muradin Bronzebeard and Garrosh Hellscream cover their escape, the orc shoving a protesting Saurfang out the gate and shutting it behind him while Muradin grimaces at the hole in her chest. Garrosh then faces her, axes in his hands and undaunted, eyes sun-bright and just as searing, even as the cloud of ice she’s summoned looms threateningly overhead. She doesn’t want to do this, no; irrationally, she would just like to keep looking at him, and maybe she will remember what the sun looks like, what its warmth feels like. Northrend has not been kind to her in this respect, and the Lich King even less so, and above all things, she is painfully aware of the trench in her chest, air passing through the great cavity of her death-wound.

Jaina does as she’s told, all the same.

When a val’kyr pulls Garrosh into their plane of existence, minutes later while she and a newly-resurrected Muradin stood to the side, it’s with a howl that lives up to his father’s name, rattling off the walls and up to the throne, and Jaina says “I’m sorry.”

\---

The Ashen Verdict does not come back for the next few days, the weight of losing the three of them, as well as countless soldiers, undermining their morale. It’s just as well; while she can restrain herself and can push herself away from the sentient dark clinging to her bones like sludge long enough to give them a precious few minutes to escape, Garrosh cannot. Garrosh is two steps away from being mindless.

They’re keeping him in an adjunct chamber to Lady Deathwhisper’s grand hall, and they made the mistake of resurrecting him without chaining his body first. His coming back is harsher than hers, a bestial rage manifesting upon his waking and possessing him for days. His howls are a near constant for the first several hours, tearing apart with his bare hands any of the damned that come near him. Jaina watches from afar, chaining him with ice when instructed, but otherwise doing nothing to stop him from breaking free of them and continuing his rampage. It is something to behold, this great and terrible creature he has become, and sometimes she can pretend that his eyes are still sunburst yellow rather than this blood red that they are now, holding obstinately to the memory of his blistering glower from a few days ago. Right now, it is all she has; Muradin was taken away shortly after Garrosh’s resurrection so that they would not tear each other to pieces. Jaina is the only one who can chain him for any significant amount of time, and he knows it. Their master knows it.

Eventually, he quiets when she throws ice-shackles upon his wrists and ankles, but she is liberal with the length of chain she gives him, and he stalks back and forth like a caged beast. He glares at her openly, and she doesn’t blame him; it wasn’t as if she didn’t kill him. But this doesn’t stop her from staring right back, seeing yellow behind her eyelids when she blinks. It helps her keep what little will she has, however small a remainder that may be. When he finally speaks, it sounds more a snarl than anything else.

“Proudmoore,” he barks, his voice deeper than it was before, raspier from the metallic, rattling undertone token of all death knights. His speaking somehow makes him even more beast-like than he was in his silence, the growling restraint apparent in his voice a threat of things to come.

“Yes?” she replies, her own voice a quiet hiss, a gust of wind whipping through the chasm of her throat. Her death-wound has since been healed over, Lady Deathwhisper surprisingly gentle with her as she worked her blood magic and she watched her wound stitch itself back together, but she still feels emptied-out, still feels the space that their master has carved into her.

“Come here,” he growls. He sneers at her expectantly, unnaturally still, and Jaina knows that she’s being hunted. She sees it in the curl of his fingers as she steps closer, the slight twitch of them as the distance between them shortens. This does not her stop her in the slightest, even as those fingers find her neck the second she is within reach.

She is not frightened when he lifts her off the ground; it does not matter if she dies again. She merely blinks down at him, his hands trembling with rage, and when he realizes she is not afraid, he throws her to the ground. The pain does not induce fear, either; it merely makes her angry.

“Don’t _stare_ at me like I’m a fucking animal,” he snarls.

“Don’t act like one,” she replies, frost crawling up her arms and icicles forming around her hands. “I am merely doing as I am told.” He growls at her again, but she continues with “Perhaps if you did the same, you wouldn’t have to be chained up like one.” This is an anger she never allowed herself to have when she was alive, but the orc draws it out of her all the same, as if he were provoking a viper; this was the sort of anger that lit up Stratholme and that swallowed all it touched. But this anger is what will keep her the little will she had left. If Sylvanas could do it, then so will she, even with that dark glacier of intellect pressing up against her hollowed insides even now. It must be amused, seeing her desperately cling to the pieces of herself left, even if that meant taking shelter in the blizzard of her fury, being consumed by it until there was nothing left of her at all.

Garrosh begins to snarl at her, but cuts it off half way through, swallowing it down. His eyes are glowing, but not yellow or blue, bright red orbs staring down at her, and in death his skin looks oddly ruddy as well.

Jaina says “I’m sorry,” again, not really knowing why, and Garrosh just sneers. He snaps his chains effortlessly, as if he was snapping a twig, but he doesn’t attack her again.

\---

She and Garrosh stay together in their training.

Their talents are radically different- hers obviously lay in ice magic, and Garrosh discovered that his lay in blood magic shortly after she stopped attempting to chain him and whatever animate thing he touched started disintegrating within seconds of him doing so, even when he didn’t rip them apart. However, neither of them knows unholy magic, and they are taught it together. They’re set up in a large courtyard within the citadel, isolated from the main building and spacious enough to house them, any cultists that might be using the area as well, and the dozens of corpses placed within for their use.

Lady Deathwhisper is their instructor and Jaina thinks maybe this is supposed to be a great honor that they are unworthy of, judging by the way that the living cultists are glaring at them, and this is something that she’s become acutely aware of, whether or not the things around her draw breath or not, if there’s a warmth she cannot help but covet radiating from their still-living bodies, if Garrosh looks at them like they’re something to eat; this is how she knows something is alive.

The magic is easy to learn, at least for her, surprisingly enough. Jaina can raise ghouls with such little effort that it leaves her with a distant terror as to why this is so easy for her. Garrosh however has a hard time controlling the visceral hunger that undeath has cursed him with, as well as the violent, impulsive temper he had in the first place, and while he can raise the ghouls with little trouble, he cannot control them at all. The moment they are summoned, they wreak havoc or run in fear from their summoner who is all-too-close to breaking them down and consuming the bits of soul left in them. Jaina’s ghouls stand at perfect attention when she raises them, and she can make them do any assortment of tasks; she could make them perform a circus act if she so wished with the control she had, at least according to their teacher.

“You have a bright future ahead of you with that kind of talent,” Lady Deathwhisper compliments earnestly, and Jaina doesn’t really know how to react to that.

Lady Deathwhisper reminds her a little bit too much of her teachers at Dalaran- well-intentioned if not a bit preachy, but a good teacher- and Jaina is morbidly curious as to what she was like when she was alive. She realizes that Deathwhisper probably went into this not-life willingly and can’t help but feel disappointed. It is a distant and foggy thing, a weight that sits in her chest that is devoid of any sort of sensation except that of a damp heaviness. It’s not as if she’s surprised, but seeing Deathwhisper’s faceless skull and hearing a voice that could very well belong to one of her instructors from Dalaran doesn’t soften the blow, particularly when Deathwhisper has to work with Garrosh with his control more and sounds legitimately sincere in her wanting Garrosh to improve for his own sake, that she believed that he was capable of great things if he put forth the effort.

“Again,” she orders, and with a grunt Garrosh manages to call forth another ghoul, it wresting itself from the icy earth in the courtyard where they stand. He fixates on it, eyes a bright and hungry red, and the ghoul curls away from him, gurgling in confusion.

“Do not consume it- dominate it. Make it love and fear you,” she instructs. “You are its master and it is your minion. Reach out with your mind and make it aware of this fact.” Garrosh grunts again, squinting at the ghoul, but he doesn’t seem to want to destroy it so much now, and the ghoul turns back to him unblinking, standing up straighter like a puppet with its strings pulled up, seemingly awaiting orders.

“Much better,” she commends. “You have improved quite a bit today, Hellscream. We’ll have you summoning whole squadrons of them before long.” She pats him on the back encouragingly with a skeletal hand. Jaina doesn’t feel sick- she’s supposed to be, she thinks, she’s supposed to feel some kind of revulsion, but it’s not quite something she can wrap her head around. It’s difficult with the pervading sense of being disconnected from her own body. She’s not sure which she’s supposed to be more concerned about.

\---

They see Muradin again when they’re being fitted for their new armor.

Jaina is standing to the side with Muradin, waiting for their turns. He grins at her in greeting and she nods back in acknowledgement as Lady Deathwhisper takes Garrosh’s measurements. She’s not sure that their instructor should be doing this; she’s not one of the citadel’s smiths for one, and again this is an apparent honor they don’t deserve, and she can tell from the sneering cultists that lurk nearby in case their Lady need anything at all. She cannot help but feel awkward and ungainly under so much lavish attention from someone in such a high position in the cult. Lady Deathwhisper is the head of the cult she thinks, but she’s not completely certain because she still speaks so reverently of Kel’thuzad as if he were still around and if there’s anything she’s learned from her time here it’s that death is not an obstacle for their master. Idly, she remembers from her studies at Dalaran a worn, leather-bound book with hand-written pages detailing older magicks, one section in particular discussing the merits of the use of soul stones versus the use of phylacteries, a much older and more complicated ritual.

She was not supposed to read this book. Advanced in her magic as she was, blood magic was not something she was supposed to be learning. But it sat on the library shelf clearly out of its rightful place, and when she went to put it away, her curiosity got the better of her. The pages were yellow and lovingly worn, some of them dog-eared and others with notes in the margins from someone else besides the author. So hours she spent curled in a corner of the library, devouring page after page of knowledge. The author merely wrote about these things as theory, but the notes in the margins- consistent in handwriting enough that she was sure it was only one person- detailed testing out these theories and their results. She doesn’t even quite understand what a phylactery is until she gleans enough context clues to figure it out for herself. It was still too difficult for her to understand the finer the details of the ritual, being a mere child at the time, but she could at least get the general idea of it. It was something of a relic one made with parts of oneself- hair, blood, bones- and hid somewhere for others one trusted to find and use to bring one back should one die.

It’s not until she just finishes the section of comparing soul stones and phylacteries that she is caught with it. She wasn’t punished for it, no; the gentleman who found her with it was just happy to have found it at all. She had feared reprimand, but the kindly gentleman merely promised not to tell if she didn’t, and asked for his book back. (She learns much, much later, when she and Arthas are chasing him down, that this man was Kel’thuzad, and had felt a revulsion mingling with a childish confusion that a man who had been kind to her as a child had become this. She wonders darkly where his phylactery might be hidden, doubting that their master would let him out of his grip so easily.)

She and Muradin talk, but it’s stilted on her part. Muradin has kept his former personality for the most part, and has apparently adjusted to a point where she is immensely suspicious of him for doing so that quickly. In their master’s taking him away from her and Garrosh, within the few short weeks they have been here he has been groomed into a military commander. She cannot fathom why he would adjust so quickly, unless he was doing so deliberately. Muradin had a will of iron and steel, and was wily enough to have escaped the Lich King’s hand for years. It was likely he meant to do so again, even if that meant playing along. She’s just not entirely sure if he’s playing. She sits awkwardly between spite and suspicion, getting the physiological symptoms of both but not actually feeling either of them, her thoughts ricocheting wildly from anxiety that even the will of one so unbending gave in to their master to a distant and petty envy that he can resist so easily that pretending to still be under their master’s control is effortless. It’s obvious, she knows it’s obvious, but Muradin makes no mention of it or even acknowledges that it’s happening. She’s not sure if she’s thankful for this or not.

\---

Their next lesson in unholy magic doesn’t go quite as smoothly as the previous one.

Maybe the armor fittings really made it clear that they weren’t going anywhere, maybe Muradin’s seemingly overnight adjustment had shaken Garrosh as well as her, or maybe their being held within the fortress for weeks on end is finally getting to them, but for one reason or another, Garrosh cannot seem to get a handle on things. They’re supposed to be reviewing ghouls before trying something much larger, perhaps a geist, but he can barely summon a ghoul in his state, let alone control it, feeding it his anger and sending it into a blind fury or the ghoul falling apart within seconds of its rising. Each attempt is worse and worse, until he’s incoherent and snarling with rage. He cannot bring himself to focus enough to even use the magic required to resurrect them anymore, which only serves to feed his frustration. Lady Deathwhisper is no help during this, remaining stern and stoic. Normally, her being firm is very effective, but the prolonging of something that was only meant to be a review has made her flexible and sympathetic as stone.

“Again,” she commands, and Garrosh stomps his feet and growls when the attempt to do so proves to be futile, dark magic skittering from his feet across the frozen earth and further corrupting it. “Again, Hellscream,” their instructor insists. “Calm yourself.” He snarls, seizing up and shaking as he forces himself to calm. A minute or so passes, crawling by slowly as Jaina watches his trembling peter down to nothing. He does not move, and Jaina tenses, rabbit-nervous and alert. It’s irrational, probably, considering that she’s only feeling the physical symptoms of it without the actual fear, and that she did not fear even when his thick, calloused fingers were closing around her neck, but this time is different, she knows. He had the capacity to stop, before.

“Again, Hellscream,” Deathwhisper pushes not a moment later. Garrosh jerks around to stare her down, alarmingly quick and preternaturally still as he fixates on their instructor. Though his red eyes smolder heatedly, there is no recognition there, and a feral sort of growling rumbles from his chest, a thunderous sound that crashes against her.

“That is quite enough,” Lady Deathwhisper scolds, bafflingly obtuse. “If you cannot rein in your bloodlust, then we cannot continue in the lesson.” Jaina’s anesthetized fear is briefly overridden by a hysterical fury, dead heart finding the outrage to pound against her ribcage once more with the thought _you did this, you did this to him, you did this to us_ , repeating in her head over and over and over. With this rage, dark magic pulses in her hands, pulses out from her body in waves, and the earth erupts as a vorgul claws itself from its grave underneath their feet. The ground tearing apart and the piercing growl of it makes Garrosh’s head jerks around to face it, focused wholly on it and disregarding Lady Deathwhisper, who is apparently tiring of their antics.

“I will return once you two have gotten a hold on yourselves,” she reprimands, skulking off right as Garrosh charges and leaps onto the hulking vorgul. The few cultists that remained after observing Garrosh’s regression leave then, knowing better than to be nearby while he’s like this. For a while, how long she’s not sure, it’s just the two of them, Jaina reconstructing the vorgul as many times as Garrosh fells it, summoning larger and more terrifying creatures as time passes. Garrosh is absolutely relentless, and scarcely gives her any pause in between her raising her minions and him tearing them apart.

Eventually, he begins to use his axes instead of his bare hands, and Jaina can slowly see the transition from beast to person, however little was remaining of it. He is no less reckless and violent through this transition, but it slowly stops being quite so mindless, less of a ravenous animal and more of a warrior. He never quite loses that wolfishness though, and Jaina honestly cannot say if this trait was present when he was alive or not with how natural it seems on him now. Their undeath has magnified the largest parts of themselves, or at the very least, left little room for pretense. Their master has stripped down their outer walls and seated himself inside, and now they must stand outside themselves, made to guard a parasite that has bored holes into them and made a nest.

When she begins to tire, her raising his targets begin to take longer and longer, and when this begins to happen, he is patient as a dog awaiting its supper; deceptively relaxed, leering at her with an expectant hunger and fidgeting when she is not quick enough with it. It’s an improvement to earlier, yes, but Jaina isn’t entirely sure that it would last without her being there. She starts raising smaller enemies farther away instead, geists that could easily escape from him if he didn’t use his head, and uses the time it takes him to catch them to recover. It’s practice for her as well as him, and she tries not to think how Deathwhisper might praise her for utilizing her time wisely, even if this doesn’t seem like it will end any time soon. Garrosh’s energy is practically endless. It must have been hours since they’ve started, and yet he’s still going.

Finally, in what feels like an eternity later and her mana is depleted enough that she thinks her body might start shutting down soon, Garrosh starts to slow. He isn’t out of breath, but his movements are getting steadily more sluggish, and Jaina’s current geist can outmaneuver him with ease. He’s too tired to get frustrated at this point, so he comes to a stop, the geist peering at him curiously from across the courtyard. A moment later, something thin and dark streaks from his open palm towards the geist and curls around its throat, launching it back over to him with a shrill squeal. The sound is cut off with a sickening crack of bone when it reaches Garrosh and he chops off its head with his axe. Jaina doesn’t summon another one, watching him carefully, but he seems to be content to be still for now.

Looking around, she thinks it might be night time now, but it’s hard to tell when the land around them is eternally bathed in a murky twilight, and the only real giveaway is that it’s marginally darker than it was previously. It’s not too difficult to see with the blue fire sconces leaving a cold glow along the walls of the courtyard, and idly she wonders how the cultists survive so well here, given how harshly cold it is. She and Garrosh linger there for a while, the two of them recovering their strength, and when Garrosh approaches her, she no longer is filled with a primal, unthinking prey-fear. His face once again is twisted with irritation but he is merely annoyed this time, opening and closing his mouth a few times like the words refuse to come out. He can’t quite keep eye contact with her, and the few times his gaze aligns with hers, he’s looking at her like it’s her fault this is happening.

She thinks he might be trying to say ‘thank you’ but his pride won’t allow it. Instead, she grasps his hand, the whole of the spread of her thin, icy fingers only able to wrap around two of his, the scalding heat of his body somehow getting through the thick plate and leather glove covering his hand. He growls, rolling his eyes, but he doesn’t stop her. After a moment, grumbling, he wraps said hand around hers, engulfing it completely before letting go and stalking off, and she’s pretty sure that’s the closest to a ‘thank you’ she’s going to get.

It makes the ensuing lecture from Lady Deathwhisper worth it.

\---

Deathbringer Saurfang learns of their presence shortly after.

He comes down to see them a few days after their ‘antics’ as Deathwhisper refers to it, while Jaina and Garrosh wandered the halls purposelessly between their training sessions. (Purposelessly, but together, and this is something that she never would have thought could happen, even in her wildest dreams. Neither was becoming this ice creature, this frost witch, but this is not something that she can easily change, nor can Garrosh change from being a blood golem. But their being together, their being friends- this is something they can.)

“Welcome to the service,” he tells them, clapping each of them on the shoulder with a grim smirk. “I never thought I’d have you fighting by my side again, brother,” he says to Garrosh with a bitter sincerity. “And I never thought I’d be fighting alongside you at all, Lady Proudmoore,” he adds, laughing. It’s a strange and terrible sound, anger bleeding through the glee.

“I’m surprised I wasn’t aware of your presence earlier.” He manages to frown for this, and the frown itself is not as frightening as the sudden transition from camaraderie to a festering disquiet, not angry so much as not allowed to be angry. “Surely the likes of you joining our ranks, Son of Hellscream and Archmage Proudmoore, is enough to be a significant accomplishment for the Scourge. At the very least it should warrant an announcement of your joining.” He grasps them slightly too hard before letting go, an undercurrent of something barely contained surfacing in his every movement, from his stomping gait to his grimacing face.

Their master keeps him on a tight leash, and it’s clear in everything he does, glad-furious to see them and rough in the affection he is allowed to show. They’re not really sure why their master is letting them roam like this, or why he’s more or less ignoring them; Jaina knows that he has actively spoken to all of her comrades-in-arms at least once in their services, but never to her, not yet at least. Garrosh suspects that he means to turn them against those they formerly called their comrades. He’s probably right, but Jaina suspects something worse. She bristles too much under the yoke of his control to not be suspicious, to not take note of the deliberate and careful arrangement of her training. Their master is planning something. She knows it. She just doesn’t know what.

“Our master is very busy as of late,” Jaina suggests carefully. “Perhaps it merely slipped his mind.” Saurfang laughs again, and they manage not to flinch.

“Nothing slips his mind, Lady Proudmoore,” he replies, and she thinks she might feel whatever is lying under that glacier of dark intellect laughing at her as well. “Not a god-damned thing.”

They decide to stay with him, all the same.

\---

Garrosh does much better in their training after that.

He’s making progress in leaps and bounds, now, and Lady Deathwhisper is proud of him, even admitting grudgingly that whatever Jaina did to calm him down worked, even if it was “disruptive to their lesson.” Jaina is proud of him as well, even if she’s convinced the feeling should leave something vile under her tongue. She’s getting used to this. She doesn’t want to get used to this. It’s not that she doesn’t want to be proud of him- she does, she wants to be proud of him as her friend and continue being friends with him- but she doesn’t think it should be over how well he can raise unholy aberrations. She shouldn’t be proud of him for how well he can kill something, how quickly and efficiently, or how many.

Garrosh feels the same way, she thinks, judging by his mixed expressions when Deathwhisper praises him for a job well done. He always looks slightly confused afterwards, caught between preening and disgust, eyes bright but his mouth stretched thin and firm around his tusks. Approval is something he craves constantly, Jaina has learned in her short time with him, something he looks for from both their instructor and from her. It makes him oddly puppyish, and this is not something she would have ever used to describe him previous to this. But his distress in wanting it from Deathwhisper is clear every time it happens, and afterwards he is tense and awkward, angry at everything. He knows it’s not something he should want, and he doesn’t, mostly, but he can’t help basking in approval where he can get it. He doesn’t tell her these things directly, but with his moodiness afterwards, his stomping gait and agitation, a dog with its hackles raised.

This only increases when Saurfang joins their training sessions as well. He doesn’t need to be there for the same reasons they do, and she and Garrosh are glad to see him in what ways they can, but he does want to oversee his comrades’ progress, and help them along in any way he can. This really only serves to point out what she had already suspected: she and Garrosh have no business in being trained together, because they are in entirely different leagues. Her mastery of the unholy is frighteningly fast-learned, and already she nears Deathwhisper in the level of sheer power.

There is no reason- no rational reason at all- for her and Garrosh to be in the same lessons any longer. It’s not as if she doesn’t want him to be there; she absolutely wants him to be there. She doesn’t want to be alone in this place, doesn’t want to be alone in her own thoughts, doesn’t want to abandon him when it was she who put him there in the first place, and how cruel would that be, to end him and remake him and end him again by abandoning him. (She swallows down a sour taste with the thought of how cruel it was to bring him to this state to begin with. She could not control her body at the time, no, but she feels no less blame for it then and no less for it now, in a rare moment of complete clarity.)

But she cannot deny the extreme difference of magic power between them. She has no doubt that Garrosh could kill her easily, but his talents came in the form of a bestial savagery and an unending hunger to fuel it. He could go on killing sprees that lasted days, and but the difference between the two of them is that what he could kill in that amount of time, she could do in minutes, seconds even, with her magic. The apathy that accompanies this realization should probably be horrifying, but she’s not even sure if she wants to care, let alone if she can bring herself to. She thinks her master might have just removed her capacity for these things as if he were flicking switches, turning off her emotions one by one with such an ease that Jaina doesn’t even notice until she’s already been numbed, if she notices at all. Distantly, she realizes that this is probably bad, but she’s not really sure what she can even do about it at this point. She tries not to think about it too hard; there isn’t a conceivable means to fix this, at least not permanently, and it seems like every time she thinks about how little feeling she has left, it shrivels up a little more.

Garrosh helps with this in that where she was made passive and apathetically obedient in her undeath, in their taking away her humanity, when they peeled off what made him a person, he became something they could not control easily, a maddened animal with jagged teeth and a temper whose fire put volcanoes to shame. They complement each other this way; they even each other out, Jaina calming him and giving him something to focus on, and Garrosh drudging up emotions that she had thought their master had removed altogether. It’s anger, mostly- they bicker more than she and her brothers ever did, which is impressive, but with the same undercurrent of grudging affection underneath, and Jaina is sure that he would commit murder for her, and she for him and when did this become so apparent- but anger is better than helplessness, or nothing at all. Anger is a driving force, and one that she needs. She takes solace in this as she stands to the side and observes Saurfang drilling Garrosh.

Muradin has joined their training as well, aiding them in re-learning military strategy where Saurfang aids in the combat itself. It’s fascinating to watch them work together, to say the least, because without the horde and alliance getting in the way, they actually get along quite well. Their dynamic is that of two dogs, an old family hound and a new, rambunctious pup; competitive but playful and ultimately learning to work together. She had found this endearing up until their instructor noticed this as well and commented on it.

“Look how our great lord brings us together,” Lady Deathwhisper sighs as Muradin and Saurfang run Garrosh through combat strategies. “Dreadnaught Hellscream has made so much progress since the two of you have joined us. Just think of how much he’ll improve under your guidance,” she sighs dreamily, staring wistfully into space. Something clicks into place, almost audibly, and Jaina very carefully schools the revulsion from her expression even as it squeezes its black, oily fingers around her stomach. The dread that grips her is without compare, bursting through the cold numbness that has been occupying her since she died. She’s not even quite sure what it’s for, or why there is a weight to Deathwhisper’s words whose meaning she cannot identify for certain.

“You have great things ahead of you,” she promises, practically glowing with pride, turning to Jaina and placing her skeletal hands on her shoulders. Jaina has to fight very hard not to dry heave, her whole body giving an abortive twitch, and she thinks maybe she can hear someone laughing just behind her ear. There is no one behind her, she knows this for certain- they couldn’t have gotten that close to her without her noticing, without Garrosh noticing first and his head swiveling around to growl at the intruder like a ravenous guard dog- but there it is, clear as day, the deep, raspy laugh of an old and bitter creature. She thinks- she _knows_ inexplicably that it’s their master, and of course, of _course_ his first contact with her is when she is the most vulnerable she has been the entirety of her stay here. She shudders and stops, freezing in place, all when Deathwhisper’s hands are still on her and she’s still looking at her with glowing, eyeless sockets. Jaina swears they’re twinkling, as if her eyes were still there, and Deathwhisper knows exactly what’s happening.

Her master tells her two words, whispers it to her as if he was announcing her execution, and somehow, Jaina feels her insides grow colder:

_She’s right._


	2. Chapter 2

After that, contact with her master doesn’t stop.

It’s little things, mostly; random and sporadically placed thoughts between her own, emotions that are not hers suddenly engulfing her. There are such large stretches of time between these moments happening that she manages to forget about them happening at all, until all at once the senseless void carved into her is filled, a great and ominous weight poured into every crevice. She feels as if her body is something he’s trying on, parts of it jerking involuntarily or falling limp as she feels herself being withdrawn only for him to fill in the empty spaces as he wrests control away from her. Her master seemingly has no care of where she is or what she’s doing when he does, and more than once he does this during her training sessions.

In fact, he does this especially during her training sessions; he seems to prefer making her arms fall limp mid-spellcasting, causing the frost spell in her hands fly wildly off-target, and then stiffly working them like a puppet until a cloud of ice is whirling around her entire body. When he makes her release it, it launches with the force of a gale across the courtyard ground and coats everything around them in frost that forms in twisted, nightmarish shapes, as long and thick as swords and just as sharp. He doesn’t hit anyone, no; he would never hurt his own subjects. It would be wasting resources. His intelligence as always is massive and all-consuming, and she had never been more wrong in her entire life in thinking that this, this thing, this sentience that is cold and calculating and omniscient, could ever be Arthas.

Idly, she wonders why he doesn’t just order her to do these things or take control of her completely like he did with Arthas rather than taking control of parts and relinquishing that control shortly after, as if he’s practicing. These thoughts are disrupted with a displaced, bitter amusement that leaves as quickly as it comes, and Jaina wonders how long her master has been sitting in her head.

 _Child, you are wrong if you thought Arthas simply allowed me to take him over_ , he tells her, and again Jaina swears if she looked behind her, her master would be there. Experimentally, she prods at this intrusive presence, and gets a flash of dark violet and fel green, of massive wings and cloven hooves.

 _Were it not for that accursed demon-spawn weakening me, I would have. But the will of your beloved prince was stronger than you know. He struggled with me for years before he was able to take control for even a moment; I have never seen anyone more stubborn._ It’s a very odd thing, hearing the disembodied voice of her master speak so candidly of Arthas while he works frost spells of varying size and effect through her hands. It’s a very odd thing that he speaks so candidly to her at all, and trying to find a rational reason for it builds up an ominous restlessness that makes her hands shake and teeth chatter even through her master’s hold on her. He has to be bored, she reasons. He’s bored and she just happens to be the toy he’s playing with. He’s practicing, she tries not to think. She does not want to be plagued by the thoughts of what he could possibly be practicing for. Her master neither confirms nor denies this directly and it makes it all the more maddening.

 _He relinquished control to me eventually,_ he tells her. _Now I have to clean up his mess._ He says this as if he were a dutiful, put-upon caretaker, and Jaina realizes that this is how he thinks of himself and it was nothing short of baffling.

 _We do a lot of things to keep our loved ones safe,_ he says almost offhandedly. Fearful and insatiably curious, she reaches out for his consciousness again and in return receives the image of brown skin and sharp teeth, of a skull painted over a face. However, this time her master does not take kindly to her pushing against his intrusion, and elects to suppress her consciousness altogether. It’s a little like falling asleep, where she blinks and suddenly she’s in a different place altogether, the sun is high in the sky when before it was still sinking into the sea, and _how long has he had control of her body_.

Belatedly, she realizes that he left her to her own devices while Garrosh was in the middle talking to her, and it’s especially apparent when Garrosh stops mid-sentence and witnesses this change happen. He had apparently worked himself up into a foul mood, and judging by the few words that she caught before he noticed the change, it was because her master had apparently deemed not to speak with him while he held the reins of her body, to which of course Garrosh took great offense. Apparently, he had been in the midst of roaring curses at her for not speaking a word to him all day, but he quieted down to a low rumble when she came back to herself and glanced around, small and helpless and scared.

“How long has it been since I’ve last spoken with you?” she asked, interrupting his rant.

“What?” he snaps impatiently, brandishing anger like a sword at her throat.

“How long has it been, Hellscream?” she asked again, insistently, not quite able to meet his gaze.

“Since yesterday evening,” he answered, words barbed like it was stupid of her not to know. “Have you not paying attention, Frostwitch?” he added, working himself back up. She shook her head.

“Our master deemed fit to take control of my body,” she replies, faraway and numb with disgust. His eyes narrow into a sneer and she can feel the heat of his rage radiating off of him, boiling under his skin while she finds that she cannot seem to stop trembling.

“ _Why?_ ” he growls.

“I don’t know,” she replies. “This is the first time he’s taken complete control before. It’s only ever been partial control before this.” He glares at her in disbelief.

“ _This isn’t the first time he’s taken control?_ ” he questioned incredulously, his voice becoming twisted and strange, anger and fear mingling and becoming a volatile concoction.

“No,” Jaina replied quietly. He snaps his teeth at her, shoulders twitching once.

“Why didn’t- why didn’t you tell me?” he manages to grit out between his teeth, speaking becoming more and more difficult for him.

“What was I supposed to tell you?” she snaps back, frustrated with fear like a cornered animal. “What I could I have told you and have it make a difference? My body is no longer my own. My body hasn’t been my own since it’s gone cold, and the longer I’m here the more I feel like I’m losing my mind. I’m losing more and more of myself every day. What could my telling you have done to make a difference?”

He snarls, his whole body twisting violently for a moment, before forcibly calming himself, still shaking with an overprotective fury when he takes her hand and squeezes so tightly that she thinks her fingers might break, but the heat begins to sear away the lingering, cloying fear.

“We’re going to,” he starts, interrupted by his own growling, voice deep as an abyss. “We’re going to get out of here,” he finishes, and Jaina wonders at the effort he had to make to be able to say that on the cusp of his bloodrage. She squeezes his hand back, and Garrosh lets out a shaky breath, still trembling with rage but coming down from it, slowly, and Jaina wonders if Garrosh depends on this friendship, unlikely as it is, as much as she does.

Her master says nothing, and she is no longer certain that he is there.

\---

Her master seemingly has exhausted himself, because he doesn’t contact her for the next few weeks. He’s working on other things, she’s sure, he’s always working on something, but she thinks that he overexerted himself in possessing her directly for such a long period of time without the helm, if he’s as low in power as he says he is. She’s certain that’s not true, not entirely, or at least not for long. Anyway, she thinks that even though she did not hear anything from him since he took rein of her body, snuffing her out as easily as a candle, he did hear the things that Garrosh said to her, because shortly after that, a few days perhaps, Garrosh is taken away for some sort of training.

“He’s been doing so well since you did whatever it was you did to him,” Lady Deathwhisper congratulates. “So well, in fact, that our master has decided to advance his training further.”

She’s concerned about this and about him, obviously, though initially it was because she selfishly did not want to be left alone in this horrible place. This only lasted seconds, however, because within the same breath, she cannot help but feel a strange foreboding, something that haunts her relentlessly and will not leave her be.

She’s deprived of Saurfang and Muradin as well, but she at least sees them, even if it’s only across the room and with subtle nods and hurried waves, with stolen glances as if they’re all school children trying not to get caught by the teacher. Saurfang she thinks is helping to train new members, and helping them get acclimated to their new environment with his usual enthusiasm and gusto, though the underside of it is tinged with bitterness, something that lingers in the crease of his smile and the bags under his eyes. She thinks maybe he does this to protect them in what ways he can, these fallen champions who suffered the same fate as he.

Muradin helps with this as well, though every time she sees him, he looks more harried and skittish, anxious and paranoid. Sometimes, she catches him looking over his shoulder, a furtive glance at best but still no less vigilant, no less wary of being hunted by something that has already claimed him as a trophy. He hasn’t been playing along as well as he thinks he has, apparently, and their master knows it, seeking to crush him under his thumb.

Meanwhile, she is worked and worked and worked until she cannot anymore, casting spell after spell until she’s just short of being unable to function. It goes by blurrily fast and mindlessly, and more than once she completely loses track of how long it’s been since this started, how many days it’s been since she’s last seen any of her companions. Deathwhisper says that it’s just practice, and that she needs to know this magic inside and out before she can hope to master it, but it’s difficult to understand the logic behind this when her capacity to think has all but been ground to dust.

She understands on some level that this is the point and that she’s being made to do this so that she will be easier to break down, be more obedient and loyal, but it goes farther than that, she thinks. Though loyalty is something her master prizes, he does also prize intelligence in his minions, and it’s so strange that he would try to beat it out of her, relentless as an ocean bearing waves down on stones until they turn to gravel and sand. She thinks he means to make a vessel of her, emptying out everything that she is until there is nothing but a husk. She can never keep this thought for long though, and every time she comes upon it she keeps it for a scant few dreadful moments until she is forced back into her training, and the dread lingers but she no longer knows why.

The only thing that has been truly consistent, the only thing that she is fully aware of even through the haze of them breaking her down bit by bit, is the howling pain of Bolvar Fordragon, echoing down to them from the top of the citadel. Jaina asks, in a brief moment of respite when Deathwhisper is distracted and Muradin and Saurfang have no errands to distract them, but they don’t actually talk to him.

“The master hasn’t converted him yet,” Deathbringer Saurfang tells her. This is all he tells her. He doesn’t really have to say much else about this; she can imagine what is happening well enough. One of Fordragon’s screams drifts down from the throne. Saurfang and Muradin look to the source of the sound and stare, and Jaina tries not to think about it too hard. She can still hear his screams rattling around in her head, even when she’s a step away from mindless, even when his screeching torment does not bounce off the walls and through her body.

One day, out of the corner of her eye, she sees Garrosh wandering to his chambers, the first time she’s seen him in weeks, and she has a death grip on that thought before it’s even fully formed, fixating on it. She tries not to make it noticeable, staring blank-faced into the glowing empty sockets serving as Deathwhisper’s eyes as she forces her hands to stop shaking and her teeth to stop chattering in light of her cold heart feebly trying to pump as quick as a rabbit’s. But she clings to this thought, clings to it even when she remembers nothing else, and waits for an opportunity to bolt. She gets her chance when some cultists come to Lady Deathwhisper, informing her that she had planned a sermon and that it started soon, and she is gone before that conversation even finishes.

There’s a scowl adorning his face when she sees him, and while a scowl would be there normally, not one such as this, muddled and confused with blank eyes. He cannot seem to focus, cannot seem to stop growling under his breath, and doesn’t notice her until she is directly in front of him. She somehow startles him, his eyes going wide with surprise for a moment before glaring at her and snapping his teeth. There’s no recognition, no intelligence when he looks at her, and this only validates the nagging quiet that had been festering at the back of her head where her master’s voice had once been.

“Hellscream?” she tries experimentally, voice soft and tinged with dread. He looks confused momentarily, but the growling doesn’t stop. He doesn’t attack her, either, lingering at the doorway of his chambers as if lost and unsure of where to go. This is where she had found him, going there with the full intention of waiting outside the door until she was let in (even if that meant attracting the ire of Lady Deathwhisper for missing her lessons), but when she arrived, she immediately began to hear a low rumbling from the other side. When she tried the door, it wasn’t locked, and therein stood Garrosh, pacing around the sparse room in a circle. He had only stopped when she stood directly in his path.

She eyes the door cautiously, having closed it when she had come in but still paranoid of the eyes and ears throughout the citadel. The living cultists knew better than to come here, this wolf’s den, and Deathwhisper was above coming here herself, but she didn’t doubt even for a second that their master had other ways of monitoring them, even if he wasn’t actively heckling everything she did like the throbbing pulse of a migraine she couldn’t rid herself of.

“Garrosh?” she tries instead, and the effect it has is small but immediate, growing slowly but steadily. His brow furrows, seemingly attempting to focus on her, and the noise coming from him goes up in pitch, sounding less aggressive and more on guard and wary. This is the first time that she has called him by his actual name, not by his father’s or the title placed on him by their master, and she can’t help but feel as though she’s broken some unspoken rule, like she doesn’t have the privilege of using it. This thought clings to her restlessly, to the very forefront of her mind, but it’s ignored in favor of calling Garrosh back from the depths of this stupor.

He shakes his head, blinking, and his glowing coals of eyes spark with recognition, locking onto her, even if he can’t get them fully open, as if sleep means to claim him, and his pupils keep drifting away momentarily before snapping back into place. It’s still another few moments until he can manage to speak, however, opening and closing his mouth a couple times like he can’t quite get it to form words.

“Jaina?” he mumbles lowly, and Jaina releases a breath she didn’t know she was holding, a puff of icy mist leaving her mouth before evaporating into the air. He flinches and grunts irritatedly at the sudden increase in cold, still looking as if he’d just woken up from a deep sleep. He seems to have a slightly easier time focusing now, but there is no mistaking the dense fog that still engulfs him.

Quietly, she asks “What did they do to you?”

He grimaces, letting out a short little sigh, but he doesn’t respond more than that, squinting like it will help him think better.

“What did they do to you?” she asks again, louder and more insistent. He snaps his teeth at her impatience, a deep rumble emanating from his chest, but she continues to stare him down, and he gives, averting his gaze for a moment or so.

“Nothing,” he snaps. She stares at him incredulously, paranoia clutching at her lungs with a leaden weight.

“Garrosh,” she starts again, and he flinches again, growling angrily through the haze. “What did they do you?”

“Nothing,” he insists stubbornly. “It was just training. Nothing’s wrong.” He- he actually rolls his eyes at her, and somewhere between one beat of her frantically pounding heart and another, irritation begins to spark. Despite her debilitating worry, resentment begins to churn in her stomach. Does he not understand this? Does he not understand what they’re trying to do?

“Hellscream, it’s not- it’s not just _training_ , it’s something else,” she counters. “Why else would you be taken away-” She doesn’t get to finish her statement, Garrosh sighing before she can even finish the last word, and her mouth shuts with an audible click from her teeth.

“It’s just training. Everything’s fine,” he says through gritted teeth. “Why do you think that because I was taken away for advanced training that it’s a bad thing? Did you think I wasn’t capable of it?” he sneers, working himself up. She tilts her head in disbelief.

“That’s not at all what I meant, why would you think…?” she trails off, agitation beginning to overtake her. She steels herself. “Why would you think that I would have any doubt in your abilities?”

“Then why can’t you just be happy for me?” he accuses. “I’m actually doing something right for once, why can’t you be proud of me?” Jaina just gawks at him in stunned silence.

“What did they do to you…?” she asks for the last time, feebly, quietly.

“Nothing,” he replies, snarling.

\---

Jaina loses track of things after that.

It’s so, so easy to let go when everything keeps slipping away from her grasp; she no longer sees any of her companions, Hellscream once again seemingly dropping off this plane of existence, and Bronzebeard and Saurfang are too busy to even spare a glance before they, too, disappear from her sight completely. She thinks she should be upset about this, or at least be upset with Hellscream for shutting down her every attempt to get through to him, but a cold numbness sits where her anger should be instead. Time passes so quickly that it should be alarming, but she cannot bring herself to care and her perception of it and herself and everything around her slips in and out so frequently that it comes to a point where she can no longer tell if what she is experiencing is real or not. Often she will slip into her own subconscious, and relive random memories that she didn’t realize she still had stored in the back of her head. Everything is sort of blue-tinted and blurry along the edges, as if her frost magic was coiling around her body in an eternal haze.

It doesn’t really help that during this time, her master starts to take control of her again, but he doesn’t even bother to suppress her this time around. It’s not a problem; Jaina is too lethargic to bother fighting against him. However, this does leave her awkwardly floating in his unconscious, drifting through the memories of people and things and places that she has no context for, no recognition, and only every once in a while does she get a clear thought. They’re fragments, usually, and leave so little room for understanding that they only start to make sense when she has enough of them passing through their shared consciousness at once.

Once, she is swimming through memories of Stratholme again, and she thinks _I have to stop Arthas, I have to stop him before it’s too late,_ and the lingering desperation triggers something in her master’s unconscious, because then she thinks _I have to tell them, I have to contact the Frostwolves before they drink the blood,_ and then she sees a young, brown-skinned orc rush forward, cutting off his apparent superiors, and drink a glowing green substance and thinks _Fool, what a fool,_ with a regret whose depth is limitless. She’s not sure how long she drifts here, whether it’s hours or seconds, but eventually her master swats away these thoughts with the annoyance of someone shooing away a fly.

She thinks it goes both ways, because there are times where she at the helm of her own body for once, however little that was worth now, and she has this odd sensation of pressure pushing against the inside of her skull while her master sifts through her memories, as if he were literally moving them around to make it more comfortable for himself there. It’s a strange sort of intrusion, as if a burglar had broken in and then styled themselves as an important house guest that she must cater to the every whim of, even as they destroy the walls around her. Once, when Lady Deathwhisper decides to test the limits of her conjured shadow-fire, how much of it she can manifest and how long she can make it last, the sulfuric smell of it reminds her vaguely of fel fire, of it falling from the sky as demons ran down her and Thrall. Normally, her master gives no mind to these idle thoughts, but for some reason, he draws up the image of Thrall from her previous thoughts of her clinging to his back with one arm and firing off blasts of frost-fire with the other while Snowsong sprinted as fast as the wind away from the waves of demons growing closer and closer to them.

Abruptly, she is assaulted with the jabbing discomfort of his armor digging into her chest, the gleam of harsh sunlight on his dark hair as it occasionally blows into her line of sight, and the smell of sweat and damp earth mingled together, he calling on healing rains whenever he can. What her master fixates on exactly, however, is when he turns his head to see exactly how close they were before they were overrun, and she can see the storminess of his expression, his sea blue eyes narrowed in grim determination.

 _Durotan and Draka’s son lived,_ her master thinks, and Jaina isn’t quite sure what to do with the truly alien sense of relief that follows.

 _His name is Thrall,_ Jaina supplies, not really entirely sure why she does, and it feels as though she is giving away a secret, like it is something forbidden. An apologetic regret churns under that thought, along with the memory of his face when he is smiling at her after the battle, simultaneously exhausted and manic from the adrenaline of battle but most of all, truly and absolutely _relieved_ that there is no longer a demon demigod blasting them down as if they were insects.

 _I know,_ her master replies, and a transient pride follows, along with a spiteful satisfaction and the image of Nordrassil seconds before it destroys itself to blow apart that demon demigod. There is a passing notion _Perhaps I should instruct Kel’thuzad to sabotage any internment camps he may come across,_ as she is sucked into yet another one of her master’s memories, this time an indistinct picture through the eyes of a ghoul as it watches from afar a group of orcs hurriedly fleeing from the smoking heap of an internment camp. Jaina idly wonders how long her master could have been working towards this, and he responds _Longer than you know, child._

He rifles through her memories again, and draws up Kel’thuzad as he was in Dalaran, when she was a mere child. She can’t see her master, but she swears he is smiling amusedly at Kel’thuzad in his violet robes, and the calm restraint he displayed when asking Jaina to return his book.

 _Perhaps I should have had him take you on as an apprentice,_ he muses. _With how precocious you were, you could have easily surpassed his power once you were old enough._ Jaina doesn’t panic at this, exactly, it’s hard to pin down any sort of feeling for too long, but there is an undercurrent of horrified understanding that roots itself as stubbornly as a weed.

 _You would have been a truly awe-inspiring lich,_ he tells her a little wistfully, and there’s something he’s not telling her, something that he’s keeping from her just behind a thin veil that she can almost see through, almost but not quite, and she is going to drive herself mad with trying to tear through it and see what’s on the other side.

 _You make good company, Frostwitch_ , he tells her and she cannot be sure of his sincerity when he does, because he sounds genuine enough but then the words that follow give her pause.

_Perhaps I should leave you whole._

\---

(You don’t remember much from before your mother passed, taken by plague like the rest of Lordaeron would be in a decade or two, but you remember the fairytales she told you and your brothers; ones of children lost in the woods and houses made of sweets, ones of young girls being taken by sorcerers in wicker baskets, and those same children outsmarting their captors.

She tells ones of knights and dragons and princesses, too, but they’re mostly for your brothers. You find them boring, and have no hesitation in exclaiming this, or in making your mother change the ending of the story so that the princess saves the dragon guarding her from the knight in shining armor. You are maybe five summers old, but already you find your shoes pinching and too tight, your dresses too flouncy and bulky; all they do is get in the way when you play tag with your brothers and their friends, and give you away when you play hide and seek. Worse still is when they make you play pretend with them, and let you be nothing but princesses needing to be rescued, when all you want to do is pretend to be a knight like they are.

One day when your mother finishes telling you the story of Hansel and Gretel again, you ask how the witch could make them do what she wanted.

“They gave her their names,” she answers with a playful smile. “You never give a stranger your name unless they offer theirs first, _especially_ if you don’t know if they’re a witch or not. Why, they could eat you up right then and there!” Your mother underestimates how much this scares you, a child raised on stories like this and the stories your father brought back home from war, where green-skinned monsters slew brave soldiers just like him, and when your eyes start watering and your lip wobbling, she is quick to amend this.

“Only the bad ones, darling, not all witches are bad,” she soothes, running her thin fingers through your hair. She’s not normally this thin, and you don’t know why, your childish mind not quite understanding that she was wasting away, but you know that this is very bad, all the same. “Did I tell you the story of the girl who saved her sisters by becoming a witch herself?” You think for a minute, and shake your head. You remember her smiling warmly at you but you don’t really remember her face all that well. She didn’t live much longer after this point, only another few months or so. You don’t even really remember how she told this story, just that she did, and the story itself which you reconstructed later when you learned to read and did nothing but peer into your mother’s story books when she finally passed.

Apparently, this girl’s sisters had been snatched by a sorcerer, who lured them out of their house and compelled them to get into the wicker basket on his back. He killed each of them in turn when they went against his wishes, and threw their pieces into a great pit. When he came back for the third sister, cleverer than the previous two, she climbed into the basket of her own accord, pretending to be under his influence so she could rescue her siblings. Then, when she arrived at the sorcerer’s house, she waited for him to leave, sewed her sisters back up with her own two hands, and the three of them plotted the sorcerer’s demise.

In the end, she became a completely different creature, but she escaped his influence, and her freed sisters brought the rest of their family to the sorcerer’s house, and burned it down with the sorcerer still inside. She was what the sorcerer had made her, and she took this, and made herself into something else. She stole his magic and made herself into his demise, without regard of what she became, herself.

You are seven when you find this story for the first time after your mother had died, and just starting to get interested in magic. Your brothers and their friends no longer even humor you with their games, and don’t let you play at all, while your father has the other daughters of nobles try to include you in theirs, however dull you may find them. You don’t hate them, no, but you can’t help but resent that you weren’t given any choice on the matter. You like your dresses, yes, but you like your breeches more, and there are times where you fancy yourself more a boy than a girl, times where you’re both, times where you’re neither, and times where you’re something in between. You just want the choice to express these things. You think maybe if you could be a witch, you would.

The next time you play with the noble daughters, you blink and somehow you’re on the other side of the room, precariously placed on top of the bookshelf, and the hum of something electric and strange-familiar buzzing in the air and in your body. You’re scared, obviously, and so are your playmates, but more than that, you are so, so, so proud that you could do this, and so excited that you’re practically vibrating, whatever is humming in the air around you following suit. You did it. You became a witch.

Your lessons in the arcane start that next week, and you forget about your mother’s stories. You learn that you really shouldn’t have.)

\---

Her lucidity is slipping further.

It’s not something she notices, at first, which in itself is part of the problem, because one moment she’ll be at the helm of her own body but in the next she’s submerged in a memory that may or may not be hers, floating through it in a misty haze. She doesn’t really notice when it happens, it just sort of does, as if the environment around her was slowly reforming to become the memory she suddenly finds herself in. Sometimes, it won’t even be that; sometimes it will just be a slow fading to white and nothingness, existing in a half-conscious state while her master is in control, and when he’s done, drifting back in as if waking from a deep and days-long sleep. But he was being genuine, apparently, in his wish to keep her as a companion, however nebulously willing she may be.

As genuine as he could be, mind, and Jaina acknowledges that that isn’t much, given how he’s basically made a home of her decaying mind with full access to every part of it and meanwhile she’s lucky if she can get more than a moment’s glimpse into his before he notices and cuts her off from it. But he proves to be as shrewd and witty a companion as any of the mage-professors she knew from Dalaran, and she’s fairly certain that he’s doing this deliberately, appearing as an instinctively familiar entity to trick her into trusting him when she doesn’t even know his name (the knowledge of it is there, this she knows, and she knew it from before she had fallen, but for some reason now she cannot think of what it is, flitting just out of reach when her consciousness brushes against his and for a split second she can see the face he once had). However, his actual personality begins to slip through, and when she is lucid, he speaks with her almost constantly, telling her tidbits here and there, small and intimate details about his followers, speaking of them as if he were their doting father.

 _He was the eldest of three children,_ he says about one, a towering troll with dark blue hair and a scowl. _She was a blacksmith’s daughter,_ he says about another, an ice-skinned dwarf with bird-quick footsteps.

 _He was a painter,_ he says about a blood elf. _She was a merchant,_ he says about a twice-dead human. _He’s afraid of snakes and spiders, she’s allergic to peppermint, he wears long-sleeved robes because he has freckles on his arms and he hates them, she has a scar on the side of her knee from playing too roughly with the family dog, he has been in love with his dearest friend for seven years and still hasn’t told him, when she was twelve she broke her arm from falling out of a tree, then as soon as the splint came off she broke it again from falling out of the same tree_ -

And every time, all Jaina can think is _why, why are you telling me this,_ and her master responds with _these people are your people, and you must care for them as I do. This is your family now, and you must protect them._

Jaina is inclined to believe him whether she wants to or not when they sit in on one of Deathwhisper’s lessons and one of the cultists- a gnome with cotton candy pink hair- finally gets the sparks flaring from her fingers to ignite into a green and purple flame, and a faint, secondhand pride leaks into her mind from her master at the gnome’s triumphant grin. Its warmth continues to linger for some time, and Jaina ponders when exactly her master began to believe the same blatant lies he fed to the cultists. He finds her cynicism amusing, apparently, as a foreign mirth trickles through her.

 _Your intelligence truly is unrivaled,_ he laughs, still filled with mirth.

 _Why go through the motions with them? They aren’t your children,_ Jaina retorts. _They are merely your pawns._

 _Even a pawn can kill the king, Frostwitch,_ he chides lightly. _Every piece is important and valuable, even if they’re just fodder, for even fodder has its purpose._ She feels something of a vague and transient regret, the emotional release of a sigh, and then he tells her, irritably: _That was something Arthas never learned, unfortunately, even when was still your prince; he’s burned through my resources and in the end had nothing to show for it,_ and Jaina flinches. She catches a brief glimpse of Kel’thuzad in the agitation buzzing in her head as loud as wasps, and realizes, slowly, that her master is legitimately furious that he is dead and out of reach. The shock that sluggishly works its way through her does not go unnoticed by her master, but he does not bat it away like she assumes he would; instead, with a cold-burning rage whose intensity makes her jump out of her own skin, he says _Arthas was a spoiled child and knew nothing of true power. The second that brat was given any, he used it for petty squabbles and his own vanity._

She- she can’t say that he’s wrong. Even before Stratholme, before this entire mess even started, Arthas had never been above using his privilege as the King’s son to do what he wanted. She hadn’t minded this at first, as a child, when it was just adventuring into the woods or exploring parts of the Lordaeron castle that they weren’t allowed to be in, but even then there had been moments she couldn’t quite wrap her head around. There were tantrums that would seemingly start over the smallest of things, and a vicious, relentless spite he carried for those he had thought had wronged him. Before long, even the privileges began to lose their glamour, and the gilded edges began to fade. She thought that he would grow out of it- his childish selfishness, pushing things around until they were just so, losing his temper when they weren’t, pushing his way into her life, pushing things he didn’t like out of it, pushing her around in such a way, friendly in his gregariousness, that she didn’t realize that he was doing it until she moved out of place and suddenly, suddenly, he is fighting tooth and nail to put her back where he wanted her, acting like she had done it deliberately to spite him, even though she had no idea of what she had done in the first place.

It’s not something she’s thought about for a long time, busy with more pressing matters for the most part and doggedly avoiding it when she wasn’t. The few times she did speak of it were with Thrall, for the most part, on nights after they had each dealt with their respective duties and spent the rest of it with each other, staring up into the open expanse of the starry sky above Durotar. Inevitably, the subject would somehow come up, though any insignificant way- perhaps Thrall would mention Sylvanas’ troubles with the Scourge in the ravaged wastelands of what was once Lordaeron and Jaina would become quiet and pensive, or Jaina would mention her growing up, laughing about her brothers and the Menethil children, and go from laughing to the verge of tears in a matter of seconds. In any case, it was through these discussions with him that she gradually came to realize how the signs of him going down his dark path were everywhere, and she somehow didn’t seem them.

Somehow, despite his worsening behavior and his treatment of her, friendly and generous in one moment and enraged in the next, she still didn’t see when he started down it. How he regarded her and behaved around her alone had taken a long time to process and accept, and even now she still second-guesses herself, still searches frantically for something she could have done, but there is no mistaking the fact that Arthas, despite all that he could have been, chose his own destiny at the expense of everyone around him. Her master’s vitriolic hatred of him is oddly cathartic, she too dazed still from the horrors of his actions to completely process it.

 _Do not linger on your actions, child, there was nothing you could have done to stop him,_ he tells her. _Nobody had seen his vices, even when they were staring them in face, so beloved was your prince. This is what made him a perfect champion for me, at the time; nobody suspected the sort of malevolence that lied in his soul, but I saw, through my servants’ eyes and ears. I knew. I carved out a path for him, and he carved out his own kingdom in my name._ _He went down that path the instant it was laid out before him, and would have gone down it even if you had stayed._ If this was meant to be a form of comfort, she isn’t sure; it’s not, she’s relatively certain, but her master is fond enough of her she thinks that it might be, a little bit, in his own way. She’s even not sure if it’s intentional, really, perhaps the latent parts of himself he had long since buried slipping through. It doesn’t make her feel better, either way.

 _You, however,_ he continues, bemusedly. _You are an odd one, Frostwitch. There have been so many points where you could have turned and went down the darker path, and yet, you didn’t. You could have, at any time- you could have stayed in Stratholme, you could have left your people to burn, you could have betrayed mine, but you didn’t. You somehow found a way out of it, every time, even when you took a path no one else was willing to take._

His envy rolls through her like a tidal wave, leaving her feeling light-headed and ill.


	3. Chapter 3

In a basement in the mage city, working studiously by candlelight in an otherwise dark room, this is where you find him.

It’s dark but you can see just fine, the eyes of the rat you have temporarily appropriated well-adjusted to such places. You’re peeking out at him from around corners, steadily creeping closer and closer, until you finally skitter to the top of the desk and stare him in the eye. He stares back at you, sneering in the dim light of the flickering candles as you interrupt his precious work, but he’s intelligent enough to know that the creature sitting atop his desk is not actually a rat. A rat’s body, perhaps, borrowed but definitely real, but the creature inside this borrowed form is something he probably became aware of once he saw the eyes of the rat glowing blue from your mere presence. He learns of your true intent soon after, when you probe at his mind and let yourself in.

Inside, you find a cold and viciously calculating mind that resists you at every turn, and your approval of this ripples off the walls of his mind and makes him wary. It’s so much different than that of the Nerubians, whose loyalty and obedience is immeasurably valuable but whose odd strength made it so, so difficult for you to tame them. The sorcerer does not fear you, not in the least, laying traps and pitfalls for you to fall into in his labyrinthine mind. If it had been anyone else, it would have worked. You, however, have ascended such mortal bonds.

It’s easy enough to avoid getting sucked in, and even easier to convince him to join your cause. He does something that surprises you, however; he does not cow to you like the demi-god you have become. He views himself an equal to you, despite how obviously you could overpower him, and so, you view him as your equal as well. He does not bend to your will; he makes a contract with you, instead.

His name is Kel’thuzad, and he is your right hand. He gives you his name, you give him yours.

\---

The king sits on his throne, and Jaina dreams.

She thinks her body might actually be adjacent to the throne, but she is also just as likely to be in her chambers, laying on her seldom-used bed and staring up towards the ceiling. She dreams, and sees through her master’s head while he plans the scourge’s next thousand movements as if he were playing chess. For as intelligent as she is, she cannot hope to keep up in this state, her barely cognizant and floating in his consciousness while thousands of thoughts are formed, processed, and calculated within a matter of seconds.

Oddly, though, he does not suppress her consciousness for this, and allows her to peek in as if she were a child spying on her father’s work through a cracked-open door. She gets glimmers of it, yes, but on the whole doesn’t really get the full picture. That’s probably how he likes it, she thinks.

Experimentally, she reaches out in her mind and touches the stream of thought flowing through the head of her master, and nearly drowns from it. In his head, her master holds the collective hive mind of every soul in the scourge, and merely glancing into it is enough to nearly lose herself completely, and leave her with a pounding migraine when she manages to wrench herself away.

He goes into her head, smooths out the jittery restlessness that dipping her fingers in caused as if it were never there, leaving her drowsy, and says: _You’ll get used to it._

She goes back to dreaming shortly after.

\---

When Kel’thuzad leaves the Kirin Tor, he takes quite a few people with him. It’s not much, but it’s nothing to sneeze at, certainly, and a relatively decent start for the rebellion you have planned. As you, he, and your acolytes flee into the countryside, he makes the suggestion to make contact with someone that he knows would join your cause. You are pleased by this; not by the fact that he brought someone useful to your attention, for you already knew, but by how he already knew them as well. This will make things easier for you to link together.

Morgan Sidhe had also been part of the Kirin Tor, but she had not been as careful as Kel’thuzad, and her expulsion from it had been involuntary and humiliating. You had been keeping an eye on her since then, had watched her flee into the foothills like you and your budding cult are now. Already, Kel’thuzad has been directing your group towards the cottage she had found and settled into in the silver-leafed forest in the north, making sure to keep it looking abandoned lest anyone discover her hiding place. You admire her; it had taken four whole days to track down her exact whereabouts, and you had had to use several birds to find her and keep up with the pattern of her movement. Someone with that sort of cunning deserved to be part of your collective.

When you get to the cottage itself, the first thing that Kel’thuzad thinks is _what a tacky little hovel_ , oozing with contempt, and when he feels the laughter rippling from your corner in his head, he adds _the only way this would be more typical is if she put on a black hat and started stealing children away from their homes_. It only makes you laugh harder. He doesn’t seem to mind, quietly smug from your approval. After dealing with your captors and the thousands of insect creatures you have taken hold of, this sort of forthcoming is refreshing. His intellect and wit in general is refreshing.

You instruct the cultists to set up camp a little ways away; not too far, but enough that she doesn’t think to stay away from the cottage if she wasn’t there already. You know she is, but a precaution doesn’t hurt, and it reassures your acolytes, who need the rest and safety in case she isn’t so agreeable. You know she will be, eventually, but you don’t need to lose any more of your followers than you have to. They’re yours, now; yours to keep. You won’t let anything happen to them. Not again.

The cottage is suspiciously quiet as you approach it; seemingly abandoned, but no animals will come near. There is no evidence of anything coming near- moss creeps up the side of its stone walls and onto the thatched roof, but this is the only sign of life that has left its mark here. If it had been truly abandoned, then the fauna would have reclaimed it for the forest. It was too good a shelter to pass up.

There is a single window within sight- there are others but it is rather small and you are currently only seeing it from the front. Kel’thuzad experimentally peers through the dusty, dirty glass, and sees dark, vague shapes that could possibly be a kitchen. There is woodstove in the corner, maybe, with a stack of firewood close by, and there is the blurry outline of a simple wooden table and chairs. However, when Kel’thuzad goes and opens the cottage door, this is not what you see at all.

Upon opening the heavy, wooden door, you and Kel’thuzad are immediately greeted with a blast of icy wind and stepping inside, you and he find yourselves in the foyer of a ruined stone fortress instead. Kel’thuzad is grudgingly impressed at this, and you can’t help but snicker at this as well, even more so when he takes offense.

The two of you sneak further into the ruins, and the sorcerer frowns, mind working ceaselessly. When he thinks the words _why haven’t we been caught yet_ , this is when you elect to tell him _I’ve been hiding our presence from her wards_ , and you nudge his eyes towards the upper corner of the sparse stone room’s high ceiling, where the barest glimmer of a runic eye is painted onto the wall. He kind of resents you for it a bit, resents this would-be witch for being more clever and powerful than he initially thought, and sighs heavily, but you still can’t help but revel in the curious awe at the sheer power of your protective gaze that he’s trying to shove down before you notice. He knows better, but you let him keep his pride intact.

You fall back from his vision for a moment, reaching out with unseen hands and unseen eyes to find where Morgan Sidhe may be hiding in the fortress. When you find her, you draw Kel’thuzad into himself and show him how you can see her, her soul a bright beacon in the murky fog that belies that no other living creature may be there. She is below you, probably in some kind of cellar. _How predictable_ , Kel’thuzad thinks, as if he’s any different.

After a while of attempting to navigate to the cellar or food larder or whatever it is she’s in, because there’s quite a bit of difference between travelling as a spirit and travelling in a physical body you come to remember, the two of you manage to find a thick, dusty old door that opens to a set of stone stairs leading down into a bottomless dark. Kel’thuzad doesn’t even hesitate; he just casts a mage light to hold in his hand as easily as snapping his fingers, and moves carefully but swiftly down the stairs. Before long, his feet reach the bottom, and after conferring with you what direction she lay in, he heads off again.

He reaches another door not too far from the foot of the stairs, a dim, yellow light spilling from underneath it and between the aging cracks streaking up and down the ancient wood. It’s not locked; there’s no reason for it to be, though the occupant of the room looks like she might change her opinion of that when Kel’thuzad opens the door and it creaks loudly in complaint.

Previous to their intrusion, she appears to have been working tirelessly over a bubbling cauldron, little orbs of mage light orbiting where the light of the cooking fire under the cauldron doesn’t reach. She has a nice little work station set up from the rubbish strewn about the cellar. It might have been a food larder at one point, but at this point you wouldn’t trust your followers to eat anything that came from down here and live. Morgan looks like she’s doing alright for herself, however- though there are books and little satchels of alchemy supplies scattered in neat piles around the cauldron and what appears to be a bedroll, she doesn’t appear to be doing anything particularly sinister. She just looks like she’s making lunch.

Morgan Sidhe has tan, olive-toned skin with wild, clay red hair and dark brown, nearly black eyes, though the first two are barely seen, most of her body covered up in layers of warm clothing, in particular a woolen black cloak that Kel’thuzad rolls his eyes at. He must have sighed at it, too, because then she looks up and frowns at him, confused but not surprised.

“Kel’thuzad,” she greeted coolly. “How did you get past my wards?”

“You will learn soon enough,” he replies mysteriously. Morgan looks thoroughly unimpressed with his answer. You knew then, in your heart of hearts, that this was going to be incredibly amusing.

“Is there some reason that you’re interrupting my supper, then?” she inquires boredly. “Because if there isn’t, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.” Irritation sparks through Kel’thuzad at her impertinence, but you take no offense at this, instead tugging at the threads of his anger and soothing them out.

“I have come to you because of a common interest; it is the very thing you were expelled out of Dalaran for, and why I, myself, have left to pursue it,” he states evenly, and despite herself, she seems to perk up a bit, curiosity leaking through her carefully sculpted indifference.

“I have found a way to live forever,” he says, and a surprised sort of hopefulness softens her features that had been hardened by mistrust.

“ _How_ ,” she asks after a moment, like she can’t contain it anymore. “ _How did you-_ ”

“I have made contact with a creature of great and terrible power,” he answers, and this is when you elect to venture out from the little pocket you have made for yourself in his head and into her mind instead. She had not been expecting you, and her hope had left her open for you to enter. Fear and awe streak through her when you make yourself known, but she does not try to fight you, instead attempting to reach out to you as well, trying desperately to keep you. She is misinformed; you are not a demon, a creature to be kept. You are a creature that will be keeping her. You whisper this to her, whisper unto her immortality and power from death, and she takes this as her name.

She names herself after the promise you make to her.

\---

Jaina stirs.

She’s still on her bed, from what she can guess, which doesn’t amount to much because her senses are still blurred over from the sleep-not-sleep she’s been finding herself in as of late. She’s not sure what actually disturbs her from this state; her master is quiet, absorbed in his machinations of running the Scourge. She wonders vaguely what he might be planning, and begins to drift subconsciously into said machinations. She’s flooded, again, but it’s not as strong, this time around, it’s not as overwhelming. Streams of thought flow over her, but she does not drown. Her master does not appear to care that she is observing his work again, his only acknowledgement a vague brush against her head, a slight a thing as sweeping hair back behind her ear. It’s a strange sensation, knowing that this is not happening in reality but feeling it happen anyway.

After wading in it for a while, how long she’s not sure (her sense of time isn’t all there nowadays), she starts to try and pick out individual strands of consciousness and follow them through. She finds, in order: a ghoul, a gargoyle, another ghoul, a gnome scientist working with several others on a strain of plague, even more ghouls, and finally, when she reaches a newly-risen human cultist-turned-death knight trainee, learning under the instruction of Deathbringer Saurfang, this is when she tries to deliberately pull at specific strings.

She’s not as skilled as her master, who can bring up any follower he pleases; Jaina has to follow through several of them before she can find the glowing white-blue strand of Saurfang’s soul. Saurfang twitches, as if he can feel the physical pull of his soul towards the throne, and Jaina lets go without thinking, immediately getting ejected from his head. Her master’s eyes are on her again, watching inquisitively, and she tries again, more carefully this time, and is able to slip into Saurfang’s head without him noticing. Pride and praise trickle down to her from her master, but she isn’t doing this for either; she’s not sure what she’s doing this for. Perhaps to see how Saurfang is getting on. Perhaps to not be herself for a while. She hasn’t been herself for a long time now, she thinks.

She doesn’t attempt to speak to Saurfang when she slides seamlessly into his head, merely content to observe what he observes, to listen in on his thoughts and remain a quiet spectator. Right now mostly, it’s him concentrating on what he’s doing, which is sparring with the trainee she had stumbled across previously. There is no exact wording to his thoughts, just fragments of things and hyper-focused images paired with them; _needs to hold sword more firmly_ , he thinks, taking note of their trembling hands, a _sloppy strike there_ , he critiques, _nice strength control in that one_ , he thinks a moment later when they strike again, and Jaina agrees, it is a clean strike, a well-placed one, but the trainee gets the sword knocked out of their hands in the next moment when they blink and glance behind Saurfang. Saurfang of course is relentless and takes no time in taking advantage of their distraction.

“What happened?” he prompts, disappointed. “You can’t let anything break your focus like that. What if I had been a real opponent?”

“Sorry,” the trainee says, faraway. They look like they’re still looking for something. Saurfang sighs at them, irritated, but he is quick to forgive.

“It’s fine, just don’t do it again,” he allows. “Now. Again.” They assume their stances again and begin to spar once more.

_They heard you_ , her master whispers, pleased. Jaina immediately feels guilt for interfering with the trainee’s lessons, but her master continues with _they heard your praise. It made them happy,_ and she can’t help but notice the uptick of enthusiasm in their steps, not much but their hands don’t tremble as they once did, they don’t seem as unsure of themself. Saurfang notices it as well, a surprised smile stretching the corners of his mouth at the trainee’s newfound resolve.

With this, Jaina flees, slipping out of Saurfang’s head before her numb panic bleeds over to him. She doesn’t- she doesn’t know how to take this. She’s trapped. She’s trapped.

She’s trapped here with no other escape, and she’s- she’s getting used to this, she’s adjusting to this and she no longer knows if she should be horrified at how awful it doesn’t seem to be anymore. She flees again, back into the sleepless dream-state that has been her safe harbor for seemingly as far back as she can remember.

Her master sighs at her, as if she’s being ridiculous, and in the moment between her waking and nor-sleep, there’s a nagging doubt that she is.

Is she?

\---

Your followers adjust surprisingly well when you move into Deathwhisper’s shelter. Humans are remarkably durable, you’ve come to understand, and there’s a stubborn pride about them because they know it, too.

But still, you didn’t expect them for the most part to take it in stride- fleeing Dalaran, running through the countryside and into the dark forest in the north, taking sanctuary with a creature such as yourself, all at your command. The Nerubians fought you tooth and nail every step of the way, but all you needed to do to gain the humans’ obedience was to persuade them. Curious creatures, humans.

Deathwhisper’s surprisingly vast cleverness and even more vast paranoia turned out to be a great boon for you; the abandoned Alterac fortress she uncovered is more than big enough to house your growing cult. Deathwhisper seems to be pleased with the company, despite her initial wariness, and soon she and Kel’thuzad have your cult in working order, though they do of course, argue teaching techniques and theories as they always did. It’s a friendly rivalry, though, and one that they clearly missed, particularly when you notice each of them disciplining acolytes that speak badly of the other to try and curry favor from them. Most of your followers are still used to the academic atmosphere of Dalaran, where they each had to sabotage the other in order to get ahead. Your right and left hands, Kel’thuzad and Deathwhisper, are quick to correct them. The Cult of the Damned is their new family, and they are made aware of it. Despite the hiccups, your fondness for them merely grows with each passing day, and you don’t mind this. This is, after all, your new family. This fondness will only make you all the more protective of them, and all the more vengeful when they fall.

If there’s one thing that your followers can hold you to, it’s that when they fall, you will bring them back into the fold, and if you can’t, you will hound whoever did this to them to the ends of this earth and the next. You will make them pay. You will make everyone who ever hurt your kin pay.

\---

_Wake, child,_ her master says, and so she does, eyes blearily opening to hazy, pale shapes that slowly form into the sparse furniture of her chambers. She hasn’t been fully awake in days, at the very least, weeks more accurately, and it takes her a minute to recognize her surroundings.

_What’s going on?_ she asks, sitting up slowly.

_You and the Dreadnaught’s training is completed,_ he replies. _Deathwhisper is holding a ceremony for the both of you to commemorate this. You need to get ready._ She sends back a wordless confirmation, and manages to motivate herself to move from the bed pushed against the side wall. She remembers having a larger bed, remembers the smell of the sea drifting in from an open window accompanying it, but she doesn’t know from where or when. She can’t remember, and the half-memory of foreign-familiar scent of salt marshes drifts away as quietly as it came. She has to get ready, she remembers instead.

Sluggishly, she starts pulling off her nightshirt and pulling on her black robes, absentmindedly tracing from the bottom of her ribcage to her navel. There’s supposed to be a scar here, she thinks, a wound that wouldn’t heal. She was that there was; she thinks that it might help this feel more real.

_You need to get ready_ , her master reminds, and she finishes putting on the black-not-purple robes, and the practical leather boots that go with them. There is a long mirror standing near the dresser from which she drew her robes, and she finds herself standing in front of it a moment later, compelled by little blips of memory and force of habit she hasn’t felt in some time.

Her hair is snow white, not honey blonde. Her skin is snow white, not peach pink. Her brow furrows. Odd thoughts. Her hair has always been snow white, her skin has always been snow white. Her eyes are blue. They’ve always been blue.

_Not like this_ , a flyaway thought says. _Wrong. Wrong blue. Seas, not glaciers_.

Haven’t they?

She frowns. More odd thoughts.

_You need to get ready_ , her master reminds again, and she brushes them off.

_Deathwhisper awaits you and the Dreadnaught in her chambers,_ he tells her, and she obeys, swiftly making her way towards the grand hall housing them. She finds Deathwhisper a few minutes later, surrounded by dozens of cultists flitting in and out of the room, all abuzz with activity.

“Oh thank goodness, there you are,” Deathwhisper says once she sees her. “Come now. We have to get you in your new armor,” she adds, waving her over and signaling her to follow.

“We had it finished just in time for the ceremony,” she titters excitedly. “Unfortunately, the crown isn’t complete yet, but we’re working on it. What we have right now will be enough for a celebration.” She nods along, and Deathwhisper leads her to what appears to be her personal study. It’s a small library for the most part, leading off of a larger, public library presumably for the cultists’ use. There’s a desk in the back towards the center, though she can’t imagine that the lich has used the chair sitting behind it in some time. Deathwhisper sort of just floats autonomously.

On the desk sits a long, dark cloak and a formal coat, dark purple with ice blue runes lining the ends of the sleeves and the bottom hem, probably to further augment her frost magic. Next to it sits pieces of steel grey armor: decorative pauldrons, a three piece chest plate (one for the back and two for the front to link together), and an overly large belt with an even more overly large decorative buckle consisting of a large skull with sharp, fearsome teeth. Lastly, under the armor pieces lay shining chainmail, simple but strong, meant to go over the coat, she thinks.

As Deathwhisper helps her put everything on- the coat first, then the chainmail, then the armor- she can’t help but find the armor familiar, somehow. It’s new armor, obviously, not a single scuff or any mark of damage, but hasn’t she seen it before?

While the once-mage fiddles with the cloak, Deathwhisper leaves her for a moment, rustling around her study for something, and comes back clutching a warped ring of black metal, twisted over itself in interlocking pieces and with sharp spires pointed upwards stemming from the top.

“It’s just a substitute until we finish your actual crown,” Deathwhisper assures her, setting it atop her head. “It’s a delicate procedure to refit it for you; we can’t risk going too quickly or our lord might be hurt. This one seems to fit well enough, though.” She takes it back, holding it carefully between her skeletal fingers. There is a knocking at the door to the study, and when it opens, the cultist that peeks their head in regards her with a quiet sort of awe as they say “The Dreadnaught is ready, my lady.”

Deathwhisper nods and shoos them away, and she begins to tell her something but the face of the cultist sticks too vividly in her head to leave room for attention to anything else for a minute or so. Why were they. Why were they looking at her like that.

She comes back to Deathwhisper grasping her by the shoulders and midsentence of her saying “We’re all so proud of you, dear.”

“Thank you,” she replies distantly. The cultist’s awestruck gaze lingers on her even now.

Deathwhisper leads her out of her study and back out to the foyer just before the grand hall. Glancing in, there is an enormous gathering of cultists, seated in neat rows on either side of the large, open room leading up to the altar, and she is suddenly, incredibly nervous. She doesn’t know why.

“Don’t worry, dear, you’ll do just fine,” Deathwhisper promises her. “Our master will lead you through it so you won’t get lost.” This does nothing to reassure her. She just wants to know why this is happening, maybe then this numb dread churning in her stomach will go away. She nods anyway to placate the lich. Deathwhisper’s eyeless sockets twinkle fondly, and she gives her a friendly, supportive pat on the shoulder before gliding soundlessly down the steps into the grand hall.

Instantly, the cult falls silent and stands, almost in unison. Their coordination is truly something to behold, and they all watch Deathwhisper float down the center aisle and approach the altar, standing at attention and perfectly still until she reaches it, turns around, and motions for them to sit down, which they do, also in near-perfect unison.

“My dear flock,” the lich begins, her voice echoing throughout the hall. “Today, we gather here to celebrate the completion of the preparation of our glorious master’s new vessel,” she continues, and at these words, the world seems to slow to a halt. But Deathwhisper just keeps going, as if oblivious to the rest of time freezing in place.

“She came to us a fount of power, and with us, she became an unending spring- a veritable well of magic whose depths and whose reach is limitless. Soon, she will be made a sacred host, an animate golem to house and guard our great master…” Why isn’t she stopping? _Why isn’t she stopping?_

“…and with her as his protector, he will lead us to even more power and glory. With the Frostwitch under his command, we will be unstoppable.” There is a chorus of cheering that she doesn’t hear, the sound shrinking and succumbing to a deafening ringing throbbing in her ears. It keeps going, won’t stop, _it won’t stop_ -

_Step forward, child_ , her master says, and she does, mindlessly, mind helplessly paralyzed with fear while her body moves of its own accord, stepping down the long staircase mechanically. Her footsteps feel sharp and awkward, abrupt and graceless, but if the cultists notice anything they make no show of it, instead looking on with the same reverent awe that the one who had come to Deathwhisper’s study had. Irrationally, as she moves down the aisle, all she can think of is what has the lich been telling them, what has she done to make them regard her as a paragon almost overnight?

_You have been sleeping for a long time_ , her master tells her. _Long enough for her to tell them the tales of your victories_. She wants to pause, to halt in her tracks but she can’t, feet dragging relentlessly forward while her master draws up the memories of her arriving on Kalimdor for the first time, she and Thrall riding away from the demons, she orchestrating the murder of her own father-

“You led your people to sanctuary and victory against the Lich King’s enemies, and so shall you lead us, Frostwitch,” Deathwhisper states, her words finally breaking back through the cloud of terror settling over her, and she is within range of the altar now, she realizes.

“Kneel down, so that we may crown you our rightful ruler,” the lich commands, and she does, she does, knees creaking as they bend and she trying to scream, but her mouth refusing to open. Her mind starts working incessantly, skidding forward recklessly with too many thoughts; how can she get out of this, how can she escape, is she a queen now meant to join the likes of Lana’thel and Sindragosa who also are here against their wishes, what has happened to these people that they would willingly do this-

Something cold and hard, colder than she is, slides onto the stop of her head and sits there, fitting perfectly, and when Deathwhisper takes her hands away, she says “Rise, Witch Queen, and look to your adoring subjects.” So she does, rising slowly back to her feet and turning about gradually, facing the audience of cultists. _Witch Queen_ , she thinks, stuck on those words. _Blood Queen, Frost Queen, Witch Queen, rulers of kingdoms we do not want, why does our king collect so many queens_ , she thinks repeatedly, stuck on them until her master pulls the thread of that thought and undoes the knot. Stubbornly, she thinks, _I am not your queen,_ and a growing annoyance bleeds through the Lich King’s patience with her.

“And what is a Queen without her loyal guardsman?” Deathwhisper continues, baiting the crowd, which falls silent again when she begins talking. “Step forward, Dreadnaught, so that you may be knighted.”

_Your knight thinks otherwise, Frostwitch,_ he tells her, holding back a snarl under a smirk she swears she can see and feel, and as she runs her gaze over the faces of the many awestruck cultists, it eventually arrives back to the stairwell, where at the top stands a figure that completely blanks her head of thought.

The only conclusion that she can come to is that this creature is a demon. Red skin, red hair, red eyes, all red and dark like blood. Dark armor he wears, covered in plate from his shoulders to his feet. He does not walk, he stalks down the center aisle with glowing red eyes on her like piercing hooks like she is something to be caught and caged. The faithful on either side regard him with a worshipful terror, and he does not regard them with anything at all, fixated on what lay before him. When he reaches the top of the altar, he towers over her only briefly before falling to his knees, all without taking his eyes off of her even once. When he stares up at her, he looks at her with something starving in his expression breaking through the ever-constant mask of ire, and something akin to sympathy makes her cup either side of his jaw with both hands. His skin is warm, somehow, he is dead but his skin is warm, made flushed and ruddy from the roiling blood underneath.

_He is yours to command_ , her master whispers to her. _Make him love and fear you. You are his master, just as I am yours_ , and the horror that streaks through her sets alight a spark of rage whose fire burns through the haze of resigned apathy.

“Bind his soul to you, Witch Queen; make him the first of your loyal knights,” Deathwhisper commands. So she does.

She does, but not quite, not binding his soul to her so much as binding their souls together; he is not a ghoul, he is not her servant, he is her friend and she will treat him as such. Frigid hands on him, she can reach straight in for the strand of his soul, not even have to go through their master snickering at her from the back of her head. Closing her eyes, she swears she can see it, a garishly, painfully bright strand of fiery yellow-gold, like squinting at the sun. It only shows faint signs of being tampered with, miraculously, splotches of red bleeding through the yellow every once in a while. She _knew_ it, she knew that he could not be chained, not wholly, not completely, and she grabs at it and tugs hard, pulls it towards herself and her own strand, a thin and ragged thing, perhaps white once but now dull with grime and filth. His soul burns brighter in her hands and sears her fingers, sears the ice off of them as she ties the strands together, starts burning away the dust settled on her own while hers begins to freeze the red splotches in their tracks.

_Listen_ , she mumbles to him, blocking out their master’s laughter the best she can. _Listen to me, Garrosh_.

She is interrupted briefly, only in halves of seconds, but touching his mind directly floods her with his thoughts, all wordless, feral anger, confusion and fear. Something happens when she thinks his name; it translates differently here, goes back to the orcish from which it derives. She thinks _Garrosh_ , and it bounces off of him and comes back as _warrior heart_ instead. There is no recognition in it on his end, it simply is, and desperately, desperately she whispers to him:

_This is your name, Garrosh, listen to me. Do you remember now?_

He’s trying to, he is, drudging up the image of looking down at her in the courtyard with turned up earth under their feet, looking down at her on an alcove overlooking the citadel and watching as her ominously flat expression turned over to one of dazed fear and confusion, looking down at her blurrily as she stands in the doorway of his chambers and tells him something, something he cannot hear, and all he does is snap and snarl at her-

He doesn’t remember, she realizes with dismay, but she keeps going, keeps trying anyway.

_Do you remember what you told me?_ she asks, just short of begging. He remembers this: tiny, ice-white fingers clutched in his, the gruffness of his voice, far deeper and more monstrous than what it should be, and finally, the words _we’re going to get out of here_.

_Garrosh,_ she repeats. _We’re going to get out of here_. Their master laughs at them, loud and long, and her ears are still ringing with this noiseless sound, the silence of the grand hall as the cult of the damned look on and wait.

_Listen to me. Your name is Garrosh, your name is warrior heart, and we are going to get out of here. I promise you, I’m going to get us out of here if it kills us._

She opens her eyes. The room is filled with light. Garrosh’s eyes are white. So are hers, she thinks, glowing white and blinding, but it is difficult to tell through the overwhelming brightness.

“It is done,” she says, voice low and raspy, exhausted. Deathwhisper says something and the crowd cheers, light fading, and Garrosh’s eyes go back to being red, locked onto her like a chain. She backs up a step, and he stands up, taking the spot beside her as the crowd continues to cheer.

_Tell me, Frostwitch,_ her master begins, mischief in every word. _What is your name?_ And she- she has nothing to give him. Not a letter, not a sound- nothing.

The world, for all of a second, stops.

She doesn’t know.

The rest of the ceremony goes by in a blur, and after Deathwhisper finishes whatever it is she’s saying to the cultists, she and Garrosh file out down the center aisle and out of the grand hall. She’s mostly oblivious to the cultists and everything else around her, really only making it up the stairs because her legs seem to be working of their own accord, trudging up each step with Garrosh right behind her. She’s not- she’s not really sure where she’s going, wandering back to her chambers, perhaps, but Garrosh stops her all the same, grabs her by the shoulder with one hand and pulls her back.

“We’re going to get out of this,” he mumbles half under his breath, brow furrowed and irritated.

She wants to believe him, she really does, but she can’t bring herself to.


	4. Chapter 4

For better or for worse, the Argent Crusade attacks again.

It’s barely hours after her crowning ceremony, and during a discussion with Deathwhisper about her guardsmen, her “witch knights” as she referred to them, that they hear a loud and distant boom, like the sound of a cannon going off.

“We already have a great many hopefuls wanting to join your personal guard,” Deathwhisper had been saying, all aglow with pride and happiness for her sake. “I suggest that we overlook their training; it would be a great motivator for potential witch knights.” The lich had gestured inside the oratory, then, which was being temporarily borrowed by those wanting to join her guard, all sparring with each other and practicing magic and the like. She had nodded mechanically, listening but still frozen with shock and resignation, when Garrosh’s head jerked to the side, looking behind them towards the foyer and beginning to growl.

“What’s wrong?” the Witch Queen says.

“Something,” he manages to snarl out. “Something’s coming.”

And that was when a crash louder than thunder was heard, the entire citadel shaking on its foundation. The witch looks to the ceiling at this crash, and there’s barely half a moment for Deathwhisper to bark out orders for nearby cultists to see what’s going on before another crashing against the citadel, this one shaking dust and debris from the ceiling. It’s barely anything, maybe a few pebbles, but it’s enough for Garrosh to snarl and yank her closer to him all the same, keeping a hand on her arm and squinting at the ceiling warily.

There is half another second before her master is suddenly and overbearingly present, the words _the Argent Crusade has returned,_ blasting through her loud enough that she feels it through her entire body, vibrating through with the strength of the earthquake. It’s a message sent to the entirety of the undead Scourge, judging by the way that Garrosh reels back as she does, and why Deathwhisper’s orders are suddenly louder, harsher, more frantic, and the witch is struck with a resigned numbness, hardly believing that any of this is happening, even when a second impact rattles the citadel.

Undead and living cultists alike begin flooding into the main area of the oratory, Deathwhisper gliding swiftly to the altar in front of the elevator in the back to address them as they continued to crowd inside.

“Remain calm,” she says firstly, and the witch doesn’t hear much else because this is when she reaches out for her master and asks _what’s happening?_

 _Light bombs_ , her master seethes, his thoughts short and disjointed. _Massive ones, dropped onto us by those accursed airships, both of them._

 _Both of them?_ she asks.

 _Yes,_ he snaps. _Both Orgrim’s Hammer and the Skybreaker, working in tandem_ , he adds, so much disgust and disbelief and rage radiating from him that it hurts like a burn. She has to admit, she didn’t think that the Alliance and Horde could get along well enough to cooperate for such an attack; not since the events of the Wrath Gate, anyway. She still doesn’t quite believe it, and when she reaches in further, immerses herself in the stream of souls in her master’s consciousness, she is immediately hit with fear and rage on nearly all fronts, a flash of light, bright and beyond blinding, and then, nothing, nothing, a thousand thoughts snuffed out with a breath as if they hadn’t been ever been there and the crushing void of their absence.

She comes back to herself midway through the third impact, the ground shaking under her feet strong enough to make the citadel creak and moan under the stress, just shy of inaudible over the noise of the crash itself. But when the crash ends, there is a great crunch of metal just beyond the entrance of the grand hall, a grinding and twisting of steel so harsh that it hurts just to hear it, even from this distance, and light begins to trickle down the hall from the foyer. Garrosh is trying to pull her further inside, but she can’t stop from moving towards it, lurching forward like a moth drawn to a flame. She manages to get away from him, slipping through the swarm of cultists flooding into the oratory, and looks around the corner of the archway leading into the citadel’s foyer.

The front gate has been warped almost completely off of its hinges, parts of it still red hot and melting away. Sunlight continues to flood into the room, though it flickers and ripples, shadows dancing across the floor. She creeps further towards the forced-open entrance, and finds a sun and sky very nearly blotted out from the swarms of gargoyles and frostwyrms trying to bring down the airships. Sindragosa herself is among them, an intimidating sight, almost the same size of the airships and flying towards them.

The witch draws back into herself, wades through the pool of souls, and seeks out the great dragon until she finds the glowing, near-transparent blue strand of her soul, following down the length of it until she can slip into the dragon’s mind. Sindragosa feels nothing but blind rage, a blizzard of fury that greatly overshadows her own and very nearly consumes her. Taking shelter in this fury, their master does not notice the witch peering through the frostwyrm’s eyes, or at least doesn’t care, peering through the eyes of hundreds and fixated on the airships assaulting his fortress.

As Sindragosa approaches the ships, gargoyles and her kin surrounding them, the figures standing on the deck of the Orgrim’s Hammer become clearer and clearer, in particular, small creatures with green skin and large hands and noses darting around the deck in between the orcs and trolls and tauren. Looking over to the Skybreaker, they’re there as well, working amongst gnomes and dwarves and humans.

 _Goblins_ , their master thinks, and the witch has the sensation of her lip curling in disgust, of angry, exasperated laughter. The creatures in question seem to be readying the remaining bomb, an absurdly large metal contraption wrapped around a transparent orb containing swirling light so bright that she can’t look directly at it without being blinded. They do not cease in preparing it, even when Sindragosa gets close enough to breathe white fire onto the deck, only continuing more fervently when she does so. The crews are scrambling to man the cannons and fire at her kin, but for every one that they take down, another two take its place, and the witch mourns quietly for the lost souls that are soon to follow. Each time one of her kin falls, she can feel the slipping away of each one, like the cutting of threads. The sensation is watered down from what her master feels, she thinks, the sting of each death pulling hard on what remains of his soul in the collective, like he is meant to be pass as well. It only makes him all the more vindicated, his fury bleeding into Sindragosa and bleeding into the witch, a dark stain on each of them.

Despite the gargoyles’ best efforts, the crew manages to load the remaining bomb into an even larger metal contraption that she cannot make heads or tails of, at least from this distance. They’re preparing to launch it towards the citadel again, and before she’s really aware of it, the frostwyrm launches herself at the bomb with an odd, frantic compulsion, clutching it between her teeth. The witch hears a crunch, feels tired relief cool the frostwyrm’s fury, and sees a split second of light before everything goes blank.

Abruptly back in her body, she looks up to a light brighter than the sun, Sindragosa’s bones disintegrating in the holy fire as well as many of the gargoyles and other frostwyrms. When the light finally fades, maddeningly, the airships are both still there, a strange, flickering iridescent barrier around each. Naturally, her master is furious. It is a rage that very nearly burns through her.

This is about when her arm is yanked back, and she turns to see Garrosh pulling her bodily towards the oratory, just short of dragging her. He’s growling, loudly, and can’t seem to stop, nor can he seem to stop shaking. She doesn’t fight it, letting herself be pulled back into the grand hall.

In the short time that she had been gone, her master had already gathered a significant number of forces, ghouls and geists and vorgul, but the witch can’t help but look to the remaining living cultists flitting around Deathwhisper, the ones gathering in corners and looking over their shoulders. The rest have already fled into whatever shelter Deathwhisper put them in, and the bone-white fear on their stricken faces isn’t something she can ignore, for some reason. They are alive, they are scared, and when the witch blinks, behind her eyelids she sees frightened townsfolk and burning buildings, all searing heat and blackened wood.

She cannot leave them like this.

“We need to go back,” the witch says gravely, and Garrosh snarls in response, baring his teeth inches away from her face. “Please,” she adds, unflinching, and grudgingly, he relents, right on her heels as she runs back to the ruined entryway.

From what she can see, gargoyles and frostwyrms are still dropping from the sky, half burnt and falling to pieces upon hitting the ground. The enemy is already preparing to land, and in the distance she can see the tops of silver banners cresting over the horizon. Garrosh won’t stop growling, standing too close behind her like he means to carry her off if she takes too long.

She exhales into her hands, a cold breath on her lips turning to icy mist pooling in her palms, seeping between her fingers and onto the floor. The mist spreads from her feet and up the twisted arch of the entryway, and when it reaches the top, she releases the breath held in her hands, spreading her fingers and letting it slip through like a sieve. The mist on either side of the entryway abruptly spreads out towards the other and solidifies, the crunch of ice loud and jarring as it thickens and creeps over the warped frame.

She does the same for the next archway into the foyer, and again for the hallway leading towards the staircase into the oratory. Garrosh grows impatient with her and just about drags her back into the grand hall, restlessly snapping his teeth. Deathwhisper is both relieved and agitated upon seeing them.

“You did very well, Frostwitch,” she says like it’s being dragged out of her. “But you cannot put yourself at risk so recklessly. I don’t know what we would do if anything were to happen to you.” It’s an odd thing, touched by her concern while knowing full well that Deathwhisper refers only to her status as Witch Queen, as their master’s soon-to-be vessel. The remaining cultists don’t appear quite so terror-stricken though, tired yes but relieved, happy to see her, and she manages to feel some measure of satisfaction from that through the numb guilt and apathy. She doesn’t quite know what to do with it.

\---

Dranosh asks you and Garrosh to call him by his first name.

The three of you are secluded in a chamber for a scarce few minutes away from the other undead, scrambling to mount a counterattack, when he asks you to call him this, rather than the titles that your master has given you. Your master had done this because in giving you these new names, he established power over you; it is the oldest kind of magic and one he has not forgotten. Deathbringer Saurfang, Dreadnaught Hellscream, Frostwitch, Witch Queen- these names are fetters chaining the three of you to your master’s realm.

“If I’m to die here, or worse,” he says, and the three of you all know that the ‘worse’ is your continuing to be stuck here indefinitely, stuck between living and not-living, pulled completely from the cycle and being forced to continue existing. “Then I want to be myself when I do… if I do.” He glances over his shoulder, towards the entrance to the small chamber. Muradin still stands there, guarding it from around the corner as scourge forces continue to hurry by, and you wonder if he has asked him this, as well.

The fact that Dranosh asks to do this at all is touching; giving you this power over him by giving you his born name is a trust that you had not thought you earned, and not even one you can return. Your master laughs at the surge of affection you have for him, the sound rolling around your head while you choke on your own heart. But he laughs even harder when you and Garrosh agree. He doesn’t bother to hide how pathetic he thinks you are, clinging to each other for whatever scrap of the life you previously had even if that means being with former enemies, still bickering even as you keep a death grip on each other.

\---

They do break through the witch’s ice walls eventually, but the scourge was given enough time to ready a defense. Unfortunately, they sustained serious casualties, losing a large amount of both frostwyrms and gargoyles, not to mention the Frost Queen herself, all immediately disintegrated in a blast of light and beyond her master’s reach, him left clutching the ends of their torn fetters while the light stole them back from him.

In response to this, her master immediately swarms them with ghouls, losing the majority of them as well, much to his rage, but not without doing damage to the Argent Crusade’s forces, forcing them back out the citadel just barely. Their retreat is temporary, this her master knows, and afterwards, patrols are immediately put back into place, and the witch is tasked with guarding the very weapon that stole her life from her.

It’s relatively quiet in comparison to the rest of the citadel, the halls empty save for her continuously circling the makeshift pedestal of varied skulls that Frostmourne floats above in suspended animation. She swears, she can feel it staring through her, the metal skull at the hilt of the blade glinting threateningly, with an almost palpable hunger. There is something about it that makes her squint, makes it hard to look at, and in the halves of seconds her eyes flick away from it or blink, there is a tangled mess in the spaces that should be empty, souls all tied together and strands in all directions. She constantly feels as though she’s walking through cobwebs, swatting away nonexistent strings and catching nothing.

There are other guards here, but they’re all away from her, at the entrance to the hallway leading to here and the hallway leading out. Only she is allowed to be in the sword’s chamber, apparently; she supposes this is yet another thing she should feel honored for, but she can’t get around seeing it clutched in the hand of the man who murdered her in the hallway just beyond this room. She tries not to think about it, tries not to think at all, just continuing to circle the sword endlessly.

\---

A few days later, the witch catches an intruder skulking through the halls.

She’s patrolling by herself still, Garrosh and Dranosh guarding the entrance to the upper spire while Muradin calculates attack plans. She doesn’t think that their master appreciates their closeness too much anymore, even if it does amuse him endlessly, like a child crushing ants under his heel. She thinks he did think this a good thing originally, when it was something to keep them chained to the Scourge, but he probably stopped about the same time that she bound herself and Garrosh together rather than chain him to herself. The height of this cold mirth was when he ordered the witch to do this, to separate herself from them, and Muradin was carefully blank-faced and his mouth a firm line, Dranosh just behind him and frowning deeply, eyebrows furrowed. Garrosh had to be chained down for the first time in weeks.

This is another familiar face for the witch, but she’s not sure if it’s herself, clinging to more of the life of her previous self, or if it’s the Banshee Queen’s infamy that places her firmly in her memory. But she greets her as she would any intruders, sending row upon row of ice daggers flying at her. None of them land, shattering once they hit the walls of the corridor and shards scattering everywhere. The Windrunners’ speed is legendary, and this daughter is no different even though her heart has stopped beating. She manages to get behind her, flash of steel and wood in hand, but the witch Jaina sends a blast of howling, icy wind against her and she recoils back, taking mere seconds to recover before moving again.

“Why do you not use your black arrows, Banshee Queen?” the witch asks coldly, the corners of her mouth creeping upwards in a lie of a smile as the ice returns to her and swirls around her. “Do you fear that they will not work on the likes of me?” She doesn’t actually want to say any of this; this curiously volatile spite that has taken up residence in her is not hers, her master’s presence pressing hard against her bones and skin as if he meant to burst out her body through sheer will alone (and she has no doubt that he could do this, no doubt at all).

“If I wanted you dead, you would be,” she spits.

“If you wanted me alive, you missed your chance when Frostmourne carved my soul from my body,” the witch hisses angrily, still smiling throughout even as the anger becomes her own. “Not that you would. You don’t want anyone to be alive. Not when you can’t be.” These words are not actually hers, and she can tell because the Lich King rumbles amusedly in the back of her head when a fury unrivaled twists the Banshee Queen’s face, her master proud in his spite and the horrors he’s wrought upon the two of them. She notches another arrow, but before she can fire, the witch sends another row of ice daggers flying towards her. She barely manages to escape, rolling to the side and sprinting back from where she came before the witch could attack her again. By this time, however, her master is no longer amused with her, his presence ominously subdued before his voice ripples through her mind:

 _I know you missed on purpose, Frostwitch_ , he states, and he would almost sound like a disappointed parent if Jaina could not feel the roiling ire underneath.

 _I was instructed to attack intruders but not to pursue them_ , she thinks. _It would force me to leave my patrol, and I only wish to do as I am told_ , she adds, wrapping those thoughts in overtly sweet venom. Her master is quiet again, and she almost has a moment to be satisfied with herself before he begins to draw up things from the back of her head and push them to the forefront. When she blinks, she is greeted with the face of Arthas as he says that purging Stratholme is the only way, and this is an image she cannot force to leave her head, her master bringing it up over and over and over until it’s seared to the back of her eyelids and her head is pounding.

 _You will not defy me_ , her master tells her over Stratholme burning and the plaintive cries of the newly-risen ghouls.

 _I was only doing as I was told_ , the witch thinks obstinately, spiteful in her stubbornness.

She relives the memory of her death shortly after and almost blacks out from the pain.

\---

The Banshee Queen comes again not two days later, and this time with reinforcements.

The Witch Queen is patrolling by herself still, her punishment from finding a way to disobey her master the first time that the dark ranger found her way in still in place, head pounding and pounding with the screams and the smell of Stratholme burning, and ultimately, this is why she is so easily captured.

Were Garrosh here, he would have engaged with the Banshee Queen and dispatched her easily, and the witch would not have been so easily distracted by her and focusing her spells on her. Were Garrosh here, he would have charged straight at the Warchief right afterwards, and she would not have had those spells ripped away from her by the water elementals that he somehow managed to convince to assist him, even in this unholy place. Were her companion here, she would have been conjuring storms to shield them, she would have been blasting hail from her palms to drive away their attackers, and she would not have been so easily held down by those elementals while the Warchief sprinted to her side and the Banshee Queen suddenly was looming over her, a pearly vial glinting in her hands.

“Hold her mouth open,” she says grimly through her teeth. “She doesn’t need to swallow it; it just needs to touch her tongue.” In an instant the orc has her mouth pried open in his hands, thumb on the hinge and between her teeth so she can’t close it and handling it like glass, gentle-firm and terrified of breaking her, evident in the wild anxiety in his sea blue eyes and the barely noticeable trembling of his hands. It is pointless to struggle, so she doesn’t. She does not fear death, even as she stares it down in the faces of those above her, the Banshee Queen grimacing with poison in hand and the Warchief looking wan and pale and cradling her jaw in his hand.

The vial pops open in grey hands, and as it spills into Jaina’s open mouth, black and oily and tinting the rim of the white vial, she can feel her master’s presence withdrawing from her head suddenly, like a small creature fleeing from its shelter to survive. It burns her tongue, but she doesn’t struggle, even then, even as it burns the Warchief as well, he jerking suddenly but doggedly refusing to let go of her. A strange amusement takes her, and before the Lich King leaves her, she thinks smugly, almost viciously: _Do you feel all of your kin’s death? Do you fear your own end, King of the Undead?_

She receives silence in reply, but she thinks she can feel a spike of cold anger before her vision bleeds out and goes black.

\---

She wakes up startlingly empty.

She knows immediately upon reaching consciousness, before she even opens her eyes, that the Lich King has finally withdrawn from her body, because there are chasms where he once pushed his mind against hers, where he pushed things aside to make room for himself with little regard to what was already there. It has been months since she has been alone in her own body, and the feeling of this is so foreign that she lurches up from where she lay, gasping and eyes wide as if she’d been drowning.

There is a flurry of movement all around her as she does this, and when her gaze comes into focus, she then sees the armored soldiers in white and gold and black, light held in the hands of some and swords and maces in the hands of others. She’s still in the citadel, she thinks; she’s just been moved to the front hall, where the Ashen Verdict has apparently set up once again. Her hands are in golden chains that burn her wrists and on either side of her sit the Banshee Queen and the Warchief, he looking tired and pale, and she as quietly angry as she always is.

“Welcome back, Frostwitch,” the Banshee Queen says from her right, in that vaguely acidic tone that she can’t seem to break away from. She has surrounded herself with so much poison that she has become poisonous herself, and can’t help but to bite and sting.

“That isn’t my name,” the witch mumbles, unsure in her emptiness where her pieces now lay. The once-elf softens marginally, the glint of her sharp teeth fading from a nasty smirk into a firm line. The orc gives an abortive twitch as if he’s trying to keep himself from reeling back from being struck by her, relief flooding through him. He keeps a tight grip on Doomhammer, all the same.

“No,” she allows grudgingly. “But this is what you are now.”

She doesn’t get to respond to that, because Highlord Fordring comes forward and nods for them to go aside, the elder Saurfang just behind him. She sits quietly as what is probably a priest approaches her, garbed in white and silver hooded robes and gold light pooling in his hands. He holds his open palms over her head and lets it drip between his fingers like water, the droplets hitting her like burning oil. She flinches, but the pain is not enough to make a sound, although she can hear the leather on the handle of Doomhammer strain under its wielder’s grip and see his knuckles turn bone white.

“The Lich King has left his mark, but he is not present here,” the priest states evenly, looking to Fordring expectantly. The paladin nods, and the priest mumbles something that she can’t quite hear even as it makes her ears burn, and the golden chains on her hands fade away.

“Lady Proudmoore,” Fordring begins solemnly. “I realize this is not the ideal circumstance we wanted to find you in, but please- we need your assistance with taking the Citadel, and the knowledge you have gained while under the sway of Arthas.”

“Arthas isn’t the Lich King,” she replies, distantly confused at the sheer lack of emotion in her voice. “Ner’zhul consumed him.” She pauses, then, a numb shock working its way through her. (She knows the true name of her former master. She can say it. She can exert power over him.) “But I will help you,” she finishes, looking up at Fordring. “What do you need to know?”

The old paladin smiles tiredly, sighing.

\---

What they ask her firstly is the layout of the citadel, what is in it, how many and where, and she’s able to answer most of it.

Then they ask her what happened to Hellscream, Saurfang, Bronzebeard, and Fordragon, and she’s not sure how to start.

“Can you tell us where they are at all?” Fordring asks patiently. High Overlord Saurfang is not nearly as much, calm and collected as he should be but there a strange fervor she cannot quite identify in the seams of his armor, in the lines of age on his face. What she feels next is strange- she does know this, or at least knows where they should be, but is strangely reluctant to speak. This is not Ner’zhul’s influence, no, but she cannot bring herself to betray their trust easily, however irrational that thought may be, especially given that in her being defected back, she technically already has.

“Lady Proudmoore?” he presses again gently when she doesn’t reply after a minute or so.

“Hellscream is,” she starts after a minute, stumbling. “He should be patrolling the rampart above Lady Deathwhisper’s chambers.” She still feels guilty, somehow, and doesn’t feel worthy of the bond she was entrusted with that lies in his first name. “Saurfang I think is with him, but I haven’t had contact with them in several days so his guard position might have been changed since then. I don’t know where Bronzebeard is.” The High Overlord is admirable in his success of not reeling back at the mention of his son’s name, the only crack she can see being his eyes going unfocused and vacant for a scant few seconds before resuming his hard stare.

“And what of Bolvar Fordragon?” he asks seriously after she goes silent.

She remains silent long enough for one of Fordragon’s cries of agony to echo down to them, and Fordring doesn’t ask again. In this moment she cannot quite ignore the sheer amount of light that congregates around the paladin, involuntarily squinting when she looks at him despite it not being visible. It is a passive awareness that vaguely grates on the back of her mind; she was not aware of it to this level when she was alive, wherein it was only a passing sense of warmth and comfort. Now, it is looking into the glare of a sun that no one else is able to see, feeling its flames lick at her heels with a curiosity befitting a child. The Light isn’t sure what to do with her, or the other undead; it knows her soul lies within her body still, but her body is merely an inert husk. It is not the sort of disgust that the elements hold, shrieking and recoiling away at this defilement of life the undead are, but merely confusion as to why it cannot collect her soul from her body. She’s dead, clearly, but it cannot sever the fetters that the Lich King has tied until her body falls for the final time. Perhaps this is why the light burns the undead, she thinks; it is an empathetic thing, but childish, almost cruel in its empathy. Ultimately, it only wants to help, only wants to heal the injured spirit in its prison of a body, even if that means breaking it free of said prison. (Perhaps, she thinks morbidly, this is why it follows Fordring like a shroud, why it still lends itself to the undead who still wished to use it; it knows that they will fall soon, and only wants to ferry them away.)

“Do you think they can be freed of the Lich King’s influence, like you were?” he asks after a moment or so. The elder Saurfang again is carefully measured in what he shows, the only sign of his anxiety and dread a minute twitch towards her.

“Hellscream can be freed, if I am there,” she replies. “He won’t be as passive as I was when I was captured, however; he’ll be furious that I am there.” Fordring looks at her with a puzzled expression.

“Perhaps you should not be present for his capture, then,” he suggests. She shakes her head.

“No. If I am there, then he will tear at his fetters all the more, and once we free him, he and I can free Saurfang and Bronzebeard from there.” she states firmly. “We won’t be able to free them at all if we cannot free Hellscream.” She’s not really sure why she is so certain of this, but it doesn’t make this truth any less unshakable.

“Will you be able to hold him down long enough for me to poison him?” Sylvanas asks.

“Yes,” she answers immediately, without a trace of doubt. She will stick her hand in the mouth of the wolf if it means she can tame it. This is a price she is willing to pay to regain his trust, even if her hand is devoured. She cannot even say that she doesn’t deserve such punishment.

\---

When they finish talking, or at least, when Highlord Fordring finishes talking to her and returns to Highlord Mograine to confer their plans, she is taken aside yet again.

There isn’t really any sense of privacy, still in the main entrance and lurking in the back corner of the room, but they’re standing away from the others, and the soldiers present have the courtesy of looking away from them at least. She would say that they can still hear the two of them, but mostly they’re just silently standing there avoiding each other’s gazes. They do this for minutes on end, until the witch finally says “I don’t know what you want from me.”

Thrall doesn’t flinch, not quite, but he’s still no less hurt from her words. She thinks he’s looking pleadingly at her, but she can’t be sure because she’s looking at their feet rather than face the warmth pouring out from him like a thick fog.

“I still want your friendship. And I would give you mine, if you would have it,” he replies steadfastly, despite his obvious wounds at the lack of tangible emotion in her voice. His hands hover uncertainly at his sides, as if he would like to go further in showing his misplaced loyalty and place his hands on her shoulders or even in her hands.

“I’m,” she starts, hesitating. “I’m not the same as I was before. I’m not sure if the person you befriended is still here, or if there’s anything left of them at all.” She pauses again, heart rattling around in the hollow cage of her ribs and bizarrely warm behind her eyes. She thinks that her body is trying to prompt tears, but it is no longer something she is capable of. Despite this, her voice is still curiously even, and she doesn’t feel anything other than a great, cavernous emptiness that threatens to swallow her up. It’s a numb anxiety, as if she’s watching this happen from afar without any control over it rather than her actually being an active part.

“Then I would befriend whoever is here now, if you would have me,” he states resolutely, taking her hands in his. They dwarf hers several times over, and are as warm as they always were, but the warmth now is searingly hot on her frostbitten fingers, and all at once she feels wholly undeserving of this.

“I’m not the same,” she says again, wavering. “I’ve been forced between the planes of living and dead, and you honestly see no problem with this? You honestly don’t think me a monster?” Her voice cracks towards the end, and she didn’t mean for those words to leave her head, but out they came like a flood. He places his hands on either side of her head gently, cradling it, and when she moves to look up at him, his hands move with her, a guard she is unworthy of.

“The fate that has befallen you is great and terrible, but I don’t see why this should hinder our friendship, and I will not leave you in your time of need,” he assures her, the sea blue of his eyes turning stormy, and she almost expects dark clouds to start manifesting around them in a protective cover. As a shaman, he communes with all elements, she understands, but she has always associated him with water and wind, rain and thunder. He has always been calm and generous with her, yes, but she has seen the tumultuousness of his rage towards the deserving, a buildup of sound and fury that only befits a hurricane. She knows that is it not directed at her with complete certainty, his thunderous ire rumbling undoubtedly for her former master.

“Warchief-” she starts.

“Thrall,” he corrects. And there it is again, her frozen heart pounding futilely in her empty chest, thawing at the amount of trust he has placed in her, giving her the use of the name he has made for himself and giving her power over it. Thrall is risking everything by giving his trust to a witch.

“Th-Thrall,” she starts again, like she’s trying to fit her mouth around his name and relearn the sounds that comprise it, like it was something else that Ner’zhul knocked away from her instead of one of the few things that she could hold onto when he took up residence in her body. “I’m not the same. I cannot promise you that this will be the same as before.” She stops there, but he looks at her expectantly, ever-patient and steadfast as the earth that adores him.

“But I will try to be something worthy of your friendship,” she finishes, and he smiles demurely, looking more relaxed than he has been in days and gazing at her with more affection than she really deserves. She thinks briefly of looking into the sun and squints before she can help it.

“That’s alright,” he replies gently. “All I need from you is what you feel you’re capable of.” He withdraws his hands from her head, but an irrational thought takes her and her fingers wrap themselves around the straps of his pauldrons, pulling her towards him. She’s cold as ice, she knows she is, knows it in his sudden jerk when her forehead brushes against his collarbone, knows it in her fingers that sit against his bare skin and feel like they’re burning. He doesn’t seem to mind, however, wrapping his arms around her waist and her shoulders, cupping the back of her head. The heat coming off him is scalding, but it’s a burn she needs, something that leaves room for new things to grow.

“My name is Jaina,” she mumbles into his chest.

“I know,” he mumbles into her hair.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> are you ready for those fenrir metaphors because I sure am

Sylvanas had been watching them, apparently.

Shortly after the two of them broke away from each other, and during the few minutes they just stood in the now comfortable silence of each other’s company, Jaina had happened to glance behind them- she heard something, and assumed it was just some of the soldiers puttering about- and saw a glimpse of something silvery and pale and a glint of red, but it disappeared within an instant of her noticing it.

After that Sylvanas didn’t avoid her, no, not when she had to be present to make sure that the poison had worked completely or that it wouldn’t wear off and allow the Lich King to take her from them again, but she did pointedly refuse to speak with her if she didn’t need to, refused to work with her any longer than she had to. At best Sylvanas is usually a prickly thing anyway, she knows, but it’s never this deliberate. Distantly, Jaina thinks about how maybe Sylvanas felt wronged somehow by her return, how much easier it was and how quickly she was freed from Ner’zhul in comparison to her. Perhaps Thrall stubbornly staying by her side only added to this. Jaina wasn’t alone when she was freed. Sylvanas was.

“May I speak with you privately for a moment?” she asks when she manages to get the two of them as far as they could from the others. Sylvanas warily regards her with open suspicion, red eyes narrowed and mouth twisted into a grimace.

“What is it?” she inquires back with a barely-there tolerance.

“I wanted to apologize for earlier,” she starts. She has to make herself concentrate on what needs to be said because she has a faraway sort of epiphany wherein she realizes how different her voice is, how much it is like the icy winds at her beck and call; a quiet hiss mostly, low and harsh, but she manages to school it into something closer to what it used to sound like. “When I was still under the Lich King’s control,” she continues. Sylvanas’ expression only twists further in discomfort, and Jaina can see something akin to sadness lurking under the barbed distrust. “Those words were not my own but they still came from my own mouth, and I am sorry.” Confusion flickers across Sylvanas’ face, and for a moment Jaina wonders at when was the last time she had been shown this sort of courtesy, if it can disarm her this easily.

“It is as you said- you were under the Lich King’s control,” she replies carefully, skittishly.

“That doesn’t make it acceptable now,” Jaina points out. “It was still my voice from which you heard those things, and therefore my responsibility to make right. I do not ask for your forgiveness, and I do not blame you if you don’t give it to me. But I wanted you to know, were I in control of myself, I never would have said such terrible things to you, and I am sorry,” she finishes. Sylvanas doesn’t reply, brow furrowed and exuding uncertainty. She stays this way for a minute or so, and Jaina wonders again at the sheer lack of humanity that Sylvanas has experienced.

“And… thank you,” Jaina adds. “Thank you for bringing me back.”

“It wasn’t my idea, you should know. I just made the poison for it,” Sylvanas admits grudgingly. “I just wanted you dead; it’s what I would have wanted for myself, if I couldn’t get away,” she tells her, half under her breath and guarded like she’s revealing a secret. Jaina blinks.

“Whose was it?” she inquires, surprised.

“It was Thrall’s,” Sylvanas answers, grimacing slightly, uncomfortably. “After I had come back from scouting, and he heard that I had seen you, he asked me to.”

Jaina goes quiet, overcome by the apparent lengths that were gone to, to get her back. Sylvanas goes quiet as well, fidgeting uncomfortably, envy evident in her mouth twisted downwards, the glare of her glowing red eyes.

“Thank you, all the same,” Jaina says after a moment, sincerely. “It could still not have been done without you and I thank you.”

Sylvanas frowns deeply, looking at Jaina like she doesn’t believe her. Jaina doesn’t blame her.

\---

It isn’t until Lady Deathwhisper falls that they begin to hear Hellscream’s howls of rage.

Deathwhisper, of course, is none too pleased to see her, flying into a great and terrible fury herself when Jaina stands at the top of the grand staircase and looks down the center aisle of the oratory and the whole room goes still and quiet, seemingly frozen in time.

“How _dare_ you step foot in this sacred place, accursed traitor!” she shrieks from the altar, her tinny voice sharply echoing off of the walls. The cultists around her seem to be split in their reactions; some furious like Deathwhisper, but others hurt, others upset and confused and scared. Something about it tugs on her hard, cold fingers around her lungs, and what do they think of her, she wonders. Do they truly think her a traitor, or still think of her as a vengeful god, coming down on punish them for their sins. She thinks perhaps, judging by the reverent fear that lingers in them, in their stillness, like they deserve this.

“I will spare those that surrender willingly,” she says, voice carrying over the crowd. She doesn’t know why she says it, and Sylvanas looks like she thoroughly disagrees, but some of the cultists waver a bit; the ones that were the most reverent, and she thinks maybe Deathwhisper regrets filling their heads with so many stories about her. The stillness is broken when Deathwhisper sends a curse flying past her head, a black-purple cloud stinking of ash and smoke singing her hair as it whizzes past into the room behind her.

“We gave you _everything_ , and this is _how you repay us?!_ ” she accuses as the Ashen Verdict’s forces begin flooding down the steps and the cult, living and undead alike, rush to meet them.

Up until this point, they’ve been doing well, relatively speaking; only a few of their forces being injured, miraculously. Of course, Jaina has also been sweeping the Lich King’s forces with walls of frost before the Ashen Verdict moves forward, her taking out the bulk and them taking out the stragglers. She’s always had this amount of power, but she never showed it when she was alive, still afraid of her going down the path that Arthas took, and gained even more when she was dragged down that path anyway. The soldiers carry on them expressions of open fear and suspicion as she carries in her hands ice daggers, as she sends them flying towards the scourge.

Even Thrall, who so trusted her and refused to leave her to the point of holding her down and making her come back himself, can’t quite swallow down the numb horror present in his widened eyes and his mouth drawn tightly around his tusks when she freezes a geist solid and breaks them apart. But Jaina cannot be bothered to take the time to feel guilt or shame for her actions, not when the risk of leaving something for them to dredge back is too great. She will, later, probably; she will belatedly feel a sense of guilt and loss for slaying what once was her kin, for betraying the people she was supposed to protect, however involuntary that was. She will remember the hurt evident in their faces too clearly not to.

She tries to spare the living ones. Tries to.

“We cannot leave anything for them to work with, and we have no time to destroy the bodies afterwards,” she justifies, blank-faced, when the others regard her with a repulsion she doesn’t flinch away from.

“ _We had made you our queen_ ,” Deathwhisper snarls, blasting curse after curse at them.

“I am not your queen,” Jaina says, cold and hard as steel.

Sylvanas fires a black arrow right between the eye sockets of the lich, her skull shattering apart with a terrible crack and a screech that drowns out all other sounds.

“Her phylactery should be in one of the adjacent rooms,” Jaina says evenly, as if she hadn’t just slain another scourge minion through the exposure of her frost alone. “We must destroy it before the cultists get to it. Don’t- don’t slay the living ones, if you can,” she adds, soft and unsure. Fordring and Mograine nod, resuming clearing the room of her followers, but before they can send out anyone to find it, an all-too-familiar roar sounds from the elevator shaft behind the lich’s platform.

Vaguely she can hear Mograine shouting for them to still look for the phylactery, but she can’t quite stop herself from approaching the elevator, a sick compulsion rooted in her very bones. She thinks she can hear Thrall pleading with her to stop, can feel his hand grasping her shoulder, but frost begins creeping up her arm and under his palm and he staggers back. This does not impede him any further however, because he grabs her by her shoulders and flips her around, continuing to plead with her, but Jaina is not in a place where she can hear his words as language, so driven is she.

“You should stay back,” she can barely hear herself say. “My death doesn’t matter; I can be put back together again. You can’t.” She thinks he might be saying something else, but her focus is on the elevator and the roaring that grows louder and closer with every passing second. She continues toward the elevator, carrying a cold breath on her lips, in her throat, the beginnings of a blizzard pooling in her lungs. There is a great clatter of metal on metal somewhere above them, and then without warning, the roaring stops. A strange whistling sound follows, soft at first but piercing the air as it grows louder, and then the Dreadnaught appears at the highest point of the shaft she can see, hurtling towards the ground. There is still a flurry of activity around her, the soldiers chasing down the cultists and fighting and metal and noisenoise _noise_ but all the world goes numb and silent but for the single moment of her former enemy-former companion falling in front of her, locking eyes with her and not blinking.

When he lands, she can hear the bones in his legs shatter with a crunch that makes several others flinch in disgust. He doesn’t even scream in pain as he falls to his knees, still just fixated on her with a glare that could sear metal. Multiple cultists scramble to run behind him, perhaps thinking that he would protect them or at least be a distraction while they got on the elevator, but this is quickly proven false when he snarls and the ones closest to him suddenly fall over screeching in pain, and blood bursting out of their ears and nostrils with distinct pop. Then, he staggers to his feet, axes in each hand, and Jaina can hear the creak of broken bones and worn sinews stitching themselves back together with a faint hiss, steam rising off of him and the blood pooling around his feet as he lurches towards her.

“ _Frostwitch!_ ” he howls, his steps becoming faster and more stable the closer he becomes. She opens her mouth and a soft mist pours out from it, swirling around her body as it descends and blanketing the floor around her feet. It spreads out from there, the fog creeping across the floor and clinging to her heels like a shadow. She starts backing away from him but says nothing and continues to stares him down. This only seems to enrage him further.

“How _dare_ you come here after you’ve betrayed us,” he growls. Chains of ice manifest in her hands and she casts them on him, blue-white shackles forming around his wrists. He jerks back, unexpectedly at odds with her ice spells, but yanks them from the ground within seconds, the shackles shattering like glass and sending shards bouncing across the floor that melt instantaneously. More chains form in her hands, more than before, and she casts them on him again.

“You should have _died_ ,” he sneers between gritted teeth, pulling again at the nascent binds. With two on each hand, it’s more difficult now, but it only takes him a scant few more moments than before to uproot them once again, and he continues his pursuit while she circles the altar. “They should have killed you. _I_ should have killed you.” She creates more fetters, hands shaking when he gets close enough to charge her, and manages to get three of them on one arm before he reaches her, jerking him back again.

Still, she will not back down from his gaze. Still, she says nothing. With a roar, he shatters them, the sheer strength of his arm pulling them from the floor snapping them in half and the inhuman heat coming off of him making her ice magic deteriorate all the faster. She casts the other set of three on his other arm before he can properly recover, and the sounds coming from him steadily become less and less coherent, more bestial and wild.

“I should’ve wrung your neck when I had the chance,” he rumbles, voice rough and strange, baring teeth and snarling. His growling is continuous now, something that he can’t quite control, and the heat rolling off of him in waves is tearing through the fetters faster and faster. It presses in on all sides and suffocates, as if he means to choke her here and now like he meant to when they stood together in the adjunct chamber across the way months ago. She trembles but she does not fear death. And still, she stares and says nothing, gazing deeply into his burning coals of eyes as she continues to sidestep him, the icy mist keeping close to her steps.

“ _Don’t you run from me, Frostwitch_ ,” he threatens, something predatory and dangerous lining his every movement, from the twitch of his fingers around the handles of his axes to the preternatural stillness of his shoulders, the tension in his legs. There is only a brief moment where iridescence glimmers around his hand before a streak of dark shoots out from it and wraps itself around her neck, yanking her forward.

She doesn’t need to breathe anymore, no, but it is jarringly instinctual, the way she tries to pry the shadowy hands from neck and her cold heart flutters weakly, uselessly. But it is relentless in its pulling her to him, and just before it completes its journey, the blizzard that has been filling her lungs blasts out her mouth with a shrill screech and when he recoils, a truly monstrous cry releasing from his lips, the shadowy hands dissipate into the air, and she drops, stumbling as she lands. She is quick to dart away before she is captured again, ducking as one of his axes flies alarmingly close to her head.

He no longer appears to be coherent, snapping the fetters with a mere show of brute force and snapping his teeth at her in a snarl that makes her think of dire wolves, of beasts cornering their prey. But she will not be made quarry by this creature Garrosh has become, she will not be brought down. The clouds of fog that have followed her every step ripple around the Dreadnaught ominously, before she once again opens her mouth and the blizzard building in her lungs and her stomach gusts out, thickening the frigid fog. It now covers the whole altar, and before he can corner her again, she thrusts her arms up, calling the chains from the ice mist, and they start flinging themselves at him, shackling him to the floor one by one. It’s too much for him to break at once, and for each one he manages to remove, another one appears, with several more following it. The howl he produces is like no other, shaking the very walls of the oratory, but she will not stop until he is tamed.

“Sylvanas, now!” she shouts, her voice a shrieking gale. But it is not the dark ranger that surges forward at her cry; the elder Saurfang, having taken the vial of poison from her hands, charges forward with a speed and ferocity that Jaina did not expect of the old orc, eyes glinting a familiar red. She rushes to meet him at where Garrosh is chained, where he still lay howling in the face of his capture.

Even chained he is a danger, the heat coming off of him thick and cloying and wearing through her ice fetters even as she fights to reform them. He has become a hellhound, his open mouth a furnace whose fires threaten to burn through her, and still she grasps either side of his jaw with icy hands and coats it until it freezes in place, trying to still him the best she can for Saurfang. The elder orc does not hesitate once, not when he pops the cork on the pearly vial and starts to pour the inky poison down the Dreadnaught’s throat, and not when the beast breaks free of Jaina’s hold on his jaw and lurches forward, snapping his teeth shut around Saurfang’s wrist. It doesn’t even warrant a cry of pain, the only sign of Saurfang’s discomfort a wince and the slightest twitch as blood splatters over Garrosh’s teeth and down the front of his armor.

But soon the poison takes hold of him, red eyes dimming as they roll in the back of his head, and he falls forward, no longer producing the unnatural heat that boiling blood makes, and Saurfang’s severed hand falls out of his mouth, skittering across the floor. It is eerily quiet now that Garrosh’s roars no longer resound through the room, and now Jaina can hear Saurfang’s shallow breathing. The soldiers are still running around feverishly looking for the phylactery, still cutting down the remaining stragglers, but where the overwhelming howls of Garrosh were before, a gaping void now sits, deafening in its silence. Saurfang keeps his gaze on the unconscious beast, and not the remains of his once-strong hand, left as nothing but bone and sinew after what the hellhound had done to it, breaking down and absorbing it as soon as it was inside his mouth.             

“How long until he comes back up?” Saurfang grits through his teeth, shaking. A presumed healer (not the same one that had looked at her before- a troll this time, in a ragged purple shawl) rushes over to him, trying to pull him aside, but is met with a snarl instead and recoils. Sylvanas shakes her head.

“I don’t know,” she admits. “Hours? Days? He might not even come back at all. I wasn’t able to properly test the poison before this; there was no time. We were lucky that it worked on Lady Proudmoore in the first place.” Saurfang growls in frustration. The healer recovers, gathering her resolve and ushering Saurfang aside irritatedly as other healers cluster around them.

“How long was I asleep?” Jaina asks quietly. She hadn’t really thought about it before; she had just drifted off, blinked, and suddenly found herself looking up at Thrall and Sylvanas.

“Six hours,” Sylvanas replies. “We do not have the liberty to wait that long, now.” Jaina tilts her head at her, thoughtful.

“Could we bring him back, ourselves?” she poses carefully. She has not ever brought anyone back, herself, not to this extent, but the knowledge was instilled in her, as it was in all powerful Scourge. She doesn’t doubt that she could, given Ner’zhul’s plans for her.

“I am not certain,” Sylvanas replies. “A death knight of his caliber would be difficult to bring back to begin with; we might not have the magical strength to do so. At best, it would be a massive drain on us, and we wouldn’t be able to continue with the siege.” She doesn’t say what it would be at worst. She doesn’t need to.

“His soul is bound to mine,” Jaina says as if it’s nothing. “I could call him back from whatever magic the poison sealed him away with.” Sylvanas looks mildly baffled by this admission, and Thrall, just behind her, even more so, perhaps even a bit hurt.

“While true that may be,” the banshee starts, clearly not believing that at all. “We would still need a catalyst for it. I intended for that poison to completely block out any sort of mind-altering magic; a normal resurrection isn’t going to cut it.”

“What if we used Deathwhisper’s phylactery?” Jaina says. Sylvanas blinks at her, surprised at the sort of morbid cleverness she possesses.

“That could work,” she allows, inexplicably, begrudgingly pleased. “It would give us the extra power we need. The chances of success would be a lot more likely.” Jaina nods. The approval sits oddly on Sylvanas’ face, however, as if it leaves a strange taste in her mouth. Jaina suspects that it would, given that any emotion that isn’t rage or melancholy would be strange for a banshee.

\---

This isn’t new.

This is something that you had even when you were living, a mind with quietly ruthless machinations that alarmed even your teachers at Dalaran. This is how you saved Grom Hellscream, your companion-enemy’s father. You saved him by taking his soul from his fel-tainted body and putting it in a soulgem, a technique only warlocks would know but something you learned anyway, independently of your superior mages’ teachings. Thrall did not mind, looking at you with such affirming relief even as your fellow mages, the people you were meant to be leading, looked at you with surprise and suspicion. This is an act of vicious intellect that is expected of someone who is going down the same path that their fallen prince had gone, but you tell yourself that this is without a doubt the right decision.

You try not to think about how he probably thought that too, even as you tear the curse from Hellscream’s body, and restore it the best you can. You are more a witch than you thought, but you can’t quite seem to bring yourself to be concerned about this. Perhaps being a witch was something you were supposed to be, but the difference between you and Arthas is that you kept your own self. Arthas didn’t.

\---

The phylactery is found shortly afterwards.

It’s a group of soldiers that find it after clearing away the last of the cultists and bring it back to Mograine. He regards them warily when they ask for it, and the imprisoned cultists even more so, clutching the neck of the green glass bottle in his fist. The glass stopper is an ornate skull, because liches are nothing if not predictably conceited, and sealed with strips of runed frostweave that glow faintly if stared at for too long. But Fordring nods for him to give it to them, and he reluctantly does so. Jaina thanks him politely, Sylvanas’ face once again twisting in confusion as she takes the bottle, and they move back to where Garrosh still lay chained on the floor.

Thrall has at least given him the dignity of flipping him onto his back, apparently, rather than let him lay face down on the floor as he was when he went down. The shaman lingers close by, sitting next to the still frame of his once-brother and friend. There is a distinct uncertainty about him, as if he’s not sure whether or not he should be there, or if he’s even wanted. That doesn’t stop him from being there, and she marvels at the sheer amount of loyalty he possesses, however misplaced and stupid.

Jaina isn’t sure if Garrosh would greet him with anything more than a sneer, and has a moment where she doubts their friendship, remembering how they bickered the few times she saw them together, but then remembers that her and Garrosh’s friendship was mostly bickering as well. The only person that she’s really seen him get along with, without snapping his teeth at them, is Dranosh. She can’t pretend that she’s known him longer or better, and can only imagine the sort of treatment that Garrosh received in his homeland that made him this, something like a dog that has been made feral enough to go back to being a wolf. He cannot help but bare his teeth when it is the only thing he knows.

Thrall’s hands are resting on his folded legs, curled tightly into fists. He doesn’t look up immediately when she and Sylvanas approach, preoccupied with watching the fallen dreadnaught. His brow is furrowed slightly, and his jaw is stiffened, lips tight around his tusks. He’s looking at Garrosh, but Jaina has seen this face before, though not since the elder Hellscream still lived. Idly she wonders how much of his son’s face he has stolen, how much of his visage lingers in Thrall’s gaze. She hadn’t disliked Grom, when she had met him briefly; he was rough, yes, but friendly, with crooked, sharp-toothed grins and a bark of a laugh, giving hard hits and pushes to the back as greetings. She thinks she would have been friends with him if she had gotten to know him better, but Grommash is not Garrosh, Garrosh is not Grommash, and it will never be so.

She tells Thrall as much.

“Bringing Garrosh back will not bring back Grom,” she says sort of thoughtlessly. She doesn’t even really know why she says it; it just sort of comes out of her mouth and distantly she knows as she says it that she shouldn’t have. It doesn’t even really register until he turns to face her with a sharp, sudden jerk of his neck.

“I know _that_ ,” he snarls, furious. “I always knew _that_. _That isn’t what this was about_.” She then fully recognizes his frustration for what it is; a self-derision grinding ever inward against himself, tunneling into his very bones and leaving nooks and notches for it to hook onto and pull apart.

“Thrall,” she starts.

“ _No_ ,” he snaps before she can go any further. “I should never have brought him from Draenor. This never would have happened if I hadn’t,” he finishes, clenching his fists tight enough that they’re trembling. Jaina shakes her head.

“I killed him,” Jaina states before she can really stop herself. Her tone never wavers even once, and the anger drops from Thrall’s face in favor of a watery-eyed confusion. He’s hurt, clearly, and probably still angry, but it doesn’t stop her from continuing forward. “He decided to stay behind to cover everyone’s escape, and I killed him.” He gapes at her, perhaps meaning to form words, but they just won’t come. “It was his decision, not yours. It was not my decision to kill him, but it was my decision to chase after Ner’zhul, so his death is still on my hands. Not yours.” He makes a noise that she thinks is supposed to be a laugh, but it comes out harsh and hurt and is too close to being a sob, his chest heaving before he can recompose himself.

“I should have stopped you from leaving,” he scolds. “If I had tried harder-”

“You couldn’t have convinced me, then,” she interrupts. His chest heaves again, and doesn’t look as if it’s going to stop soon.

“We don’t have much time,” Sylvanas reminds softly, urgently. It’s gentle for her, as gentle as she is capable of being at least, but still strained and prickly. Jaina nods, and offers Thrall her hand to help him up. He takes it, and upon getting to his feet, he crushes her to his chest, shaking and holding tight. Her arms snake around his waist, and she presses her palms to his shoulder blades firmly before separating from him. He gives her hand one more squeeze, careful not to crush her fingers, stands to the side, ready for if anything goes wrong, despite being so shaken. Jaina turns back to Sylvanas, who pops open the phylactery with a flick of her thumb and watches a thin ribbon of purple smoke drift from the mouth of the open bottle.

“Will your chains hold?” she asks as they move to stand at Garrosh’s head. Jaina nods, wrapping her fingers over Sylvanas’ and the neck of the bottle. Immediately, she can feel the remaining consciousness of Deathwhisper pressing against her mind, shrieking at her betrayal. It doesn’t take much effort to ignore it. Together, she and Sylvanas raise the phylactery between them, the murky iridescent liquid boiling in the glass, raising their other hands with them.

Jaina closes her eyes, trying to see if she can still reach for his soul and hers, a yellow-gold strand and a white-grey strand tied together, and she can still sense them, faintly, the powers bestowed upon her still present, even if she cannot follow the strands back to the great, matted cluster of souls bound to Frostmourne. She can see Sylvanas’ as well, somehow, tangled up and apple red and bright, bright, _bright_. The banshee is yet another whose soul could not be crushed, twisting violently under the yoke of servitude placed upon her until she finally twisted out of it, a snake escaping the grasp of the hands holding it. Jaina admires and envies her for it.

Jaina reaches out for Garrosh’s soul and her own, giving a tentative tug on both, and Garrosh’s body gives a small twitch, the smoke drifting out of the mouth of the bottle beginning to thicken. The smog from the bottle is dense and toxic, and tugs on their fingers and lungs as it floats up to the ceiling like Deathwhisper means to take them with her. Jaina pulls hard on his soul again, hard enough that she feels the pull on her own as well, and the heavy smoke and the shadows lurking in the corners of the ceiling convalesce above them in a swirling cloud, until finally it strikes Garrosh, spilling across his chest and dissipating into the air with a hiss. Nothing happens for a moment or so, and then Garrosh’s felled body gives a sudden jerk, like a hook is under his ribcage and pulling him up. He stills again, then convulses, and this time, it doesn’t stop, the chains on him rattling noisily against the floor. His eyes fly open with a howl, red and blindingly bright and the sound completely drowning out the clatter of the frost shackles.

His body stops convulsing, but his chest still heaves, taking fast and shallow breaths as if he’d been drowning. Eventually he stills again, blinking up at them from the floor. Thrall is immediately at her side when she and Sylvanas approach cautiously. Garrosh’s eyes flick between the three of them suspiciously, mouth settling into a grimace that bears his teeth. Sylvanas’ hand is already balanced on the hilt of her blade as she moves forward slowly and silently, and Jaina wonders when exactly in their undeath that they became predators.

It doesn’t take long for Fordring to appear again along with the others, and they do for Garrosh what they did for Jaina, but without taking the liberty of unbinding him before pouring light over his head while he snarls angrily. Now that she is not the one taking part, Jaina can actually see the little droplets burning into his flesh before it reforms in the same instant, steam drifting out of the transient pock-marks.

“The Lich King is not present here,” the priest reports, barely heard over Garrosh’s growling.

 _“Unbind me,”_ he demands, twisting around to glare at her. His eyes are red, his skin is red, and if he wasn’t intimidating before he died, he certainly is now, looking more demon than orc, all drenched with blood and hunger. “Come here and unbind me right this _instant_.” Sylvanas snickers.

“That’s Hellscream, alright,” she says snidely. Thrall sighs at her exasperatedly, but he doesn’t deny her statement, either, eyeing Garrosh as he continues to struggle under his chains, growling loudly. Fordring raises his eyebrows, frowning at bit at Garrosh.

“Are you sure?” he asks the priest, and the priest nods, though now he doesn’t look too sure of himself.

“Step back,” Jaina warns, and they have little time to do so before Garrosh tears through his fetters himself, impatient. His hand finds her neck in the same instant, and Jaina waves her hand at the people around them to stay away before anyone can retaliate.

“You _abandoned me_ ,” he snarls, working himself up, eyes leering ravenously and heat building in his tightening grip.

“I was taken from you,” she hisses angrily, ice forming under his fingers warningly. “I was taken from you and then I came back. I would _never_ have left you here willingly.”

“You should have let me stay dead,” he growls, letting out an annoyed sound when the ice begins to coat his fingers. He lets go, shaking his hand free of the ice before it could dig cracks into his armor and flesh and break it apart.

“You would have come back eventually even without my pulling you from it. Do you want me to return you to it?” she questions irritably, mist leaking from the corners of her mouth.

“No,” he grunts indignantly, as if it’s not even a question. He’s on his feet in seconds, everyone giving him a wide berth except her.

“Lord Hellscream,” Fordring starts slowly, looking a bit baffled at their actions still, and Garrosh snaps to attention, eyeing him suspiciously. “I just have a few questions before we can move on.” The orc’s eyes flick over to Jaina, who nods, and flick back to the old paladin.

“Speak,” he grunts. Fordring doesn’t appear to be bothered by his brusqueness.

“Where are Muradin Bronzebeard and the younger Saurfang?” he asks patiently.

“The upper ramparts,” he replies curtly. “No doubt that the Lich King’s forces gather there now.”

“And what of Bolvar Fordragon?” Garrosh twinges in what Jaina thinks is supposed to pass for sympathy but it’s hard to read anything past his furrowed brows and deep frown.

“With the Lich King, last I knew,” he grumbles. Fordring nods, placated.

He leaves to confer with Mograine, and Garrosh glances down at the severed hand not too far away. Saurfang’s blood still dripping down his armor and his jaw, he picks it up, regarding it briefly before glancing towards Saurfang himself, still with the healers. The old warrior looks fit to be tied, suffering through the fussing troll healer that had dragged him away from Garrosh’s body. The healer, a priest she thinks, is about the same, suffering through Saurfang’s bull-headedness.

In the time it took them to get Garrosh back up, they had cleaned the wound, careful to cleanse any sort of ill Garrosh’s undeath might carry, healed what they could, and were in the midst of bandaging it. Garrosh approaches them slowly, clutching the severed hand and carrying himself like a guilt-ridden dog, head low and neck exposed.

“I can fix it,” he blurts out in lieu of greeting or apology. Saurfang looks over to him, pained, and the troll eyes him a bit warily. To everyone’s horror, he does, the hand reforming skin and muscle before everyone’s eyes, steaming in Garrosh’s open palm. It twitches, fingers flexing, and Saurfang unhappily sits between being half a step away from being violently ill and something truly pitying in his expression, like Garrosh is a child and hopelessly naïve.

“What’s done is done,” he manages. “Do not trouble yourself with it.”

“If you’re sure,” Garrosh replies moodily. He at least gives them the courtesy of closing his fingers over the hand when it disintegrates back to bone and nothing else. Saurfang, to his credit, only looks slightly greener than he should, rather than retching onto the floor like he appears to desperately want to.

“Yes, I’m sure,” he confirms gravely. “Thank you,” he adds, and Garrosh doesn’t pout quite so much.

He keeps the bones. The two of them are subtly bullied away from Saurfang by the troll healer, glaring both at them and at Saurfang and pursing her lips at the old orc’s grumbling, and Garrosh slips the bones into Jaina’s hand. She slips them into a pocket in her robes before anyone can notice.

They begin to walk together towards the elevator, and Thrall, who had been lingering where the last fetters lay on the floor, stares at them, expression unreadable.

“Did you hear any of the things he had said to you?” she asks, voice barely above a whisper.

“No,” Garrosh responds shortly.

“He would not leave your side,” she says. “Even when we were bringing you back, he would not leave your side. He blames himself.” Garrosh snarls, upper lip curling, and startles Thrall out of his reverie when he stomps right up to him. Thrall blinks, and a moment of awkwardness passes before he starts to say something.

“Garrosh,” he says, that’s it, but he looks like he maybe regrets this when Garrosh suddenly has his hands around his shoulders and is crushing him to his chest, growling and eyes roving around the room wildly like he’s daring anyone to try and take Thrall from him. Thrall’s eyes, sea-blue, churn with fear and uncertainty, and Jaina thinks that he’s being a little ridiculous when it’s obvious that Garrosh still considers him his friend. Hesitantly, Thrall returns the gesture, carefully like he’s trying to calm a scared animal. His arms still wrap around Garrosh, all the same, and Garrosh collapses into him a little bit, head falling forward onto Thrall’s shoulder. It only lasts seconds, and before long Garrosh is shoving him away, embarrassed. Thrall’s eyebrows are drawn together and he’s frowning puzzledly, still uncertain and stilted, unsure if he’s meant to be here.

“Not your fault,” Garrosh says, snapping it between his teeth like he hates it. That’s all he says, but the fear and uncertainty melt from Thrall’s features, replaced with a pained sympathy that Garrosh sneers at.

“Garrosh,” he tries again. “I’m-”

“No,” Garrosh barks. “Not your fault.” Thrall inhales sharply like the words hurt him, but quiets all the same, clearly not agreeing with this sentiment but knowing that he’s not going to win that argument. It’s a small victory, but she’ll take it. Small victories are all they have right now.


	6. Chapter 6

Ultimately, the remaining cultists are given over to Fordring.

Neither looks too pleased with this outcome, but Fording merely worries if they will have enough troops to spare to be able to guard them and their base and still be able to continue with the assault. The cultists, however, are worrying about if literally anyone and everyone in the room is going to kill them. Jaina thinks no; even if the majority of people don’t want the cultists there, no one will go against Fordring’s orders, and Fordring certainly will not do them any harm if he can help it. They still look to Jaina from time to time, lost sheep and lost shepherd. This is all she can do for them, now. Fordring will be fair and patient, she knows, and will probably try to rehabilitate them the best he can. She wonders if they will forgive her.

Probably not. She doesn’t let it bother her.

Garrosh, of course, is right about Ner’zhul’s forces clustering in the ramparts above them, but he neglects to remember the swarms of remaining gargoyles clogging up the sky when they get there.

“These weren’t here before,” he rumbles from the bottom of the elevator shaft, sizing them up like he very well means to pull each and every one of them from the air. Jaina isn’t impressed; she knew very well how many were left. She just wasn’t aware how quickly they would congregate in the scarce few minutes they had spent in the oratory bringing Garrosh back.

“Ner’zhul must have sent them out soon after you came after us,” Sylvanas guesses, already readying her bow. She doesn’t say “he knew you were going to fail,” but it hangs in the air anyway, unsaid, and Garrosh sneers. Thrall gives her a warning look, which she gracefully ignores.

“What were you doing before?” Jaina asks.

“I was patrolling, but I ran once I heard Deathwhisper’s scream. The other soldiers couldn’t keep up with me,” he explains, cracking a proud and crooked smirk. Sylvanas glances over to him, calculating, and then to Jaina, eyebrows drawn down like she doesn’t like the answer she came to.

“Ner’zhul knew you could free him,” she says lowly, like the thought of it frightens her. Jaina nods, and the banshee’s eyes widen ever so slightly; more fear, definitely, but threads of fervent hope as well, thin and faint as spider’s silk but still there. What does she plan now, Jaina wonders.

She looks back up the elevator shaft; the sky is nearly black and she can hear the sound of wings flapping echoing down to them. She glances back to Fordring, Mograine, Thrall, and the High King himself. He had returned with his strike team shortly after Garrosh’s resurrection, made up of horde and alliance soldiers alike along with a worried-looking orc woman of high rank, judging by her armor. She’d be surprised that Varian is here, but given that she, Muradin, and Bolvar all fell, it’s really not that surprising. They’re running out of people, and it’s only natural the king himself would want to take responsibility, particularly if the Warchief had as well. They’re huddled in a circle just to the side of the elevator.

“I see our distraction worked, with an additional bonus,” Varian drawls out slowly like it hurts him to say this and look at Garrosh at the same time. Garrosh doesn’t even bat an eye at him, content to follow the dark shapes above with his eyes as if he were prowling up there himself. “I thought we were only going to get Jaina back.” Jaina doesn’t quite flinch at her own name, but her fingers twitch, her eyelids quiver like they’re threatening to. His disdain is probably meant only for Garrosh, but that doesn’t stop her from feeling like a monster as well.

“We were able to secure Garrosh as well,” Thrall quips, barely composed and defensive. Jaina can actually see his hackles start to rise, a little bit. “We’re trying to get everyone we can.” Varian goes quiet and looks away, glowering, and Jaina is distinctly reminded of cats sizing each other up for a fight, both trying to keep the air of composure but agitation roiling underneath.

“Are there any more light bombs?” Jaina asks, not to anyone in particular. Thrall answers.

“The couple we had were used in the initial assault; we only were able to make a few,” he explains, only partially bitter about this. “Gazlowe said they were too complicated to just churn out, which is a lot, coming from a goblin,” he admits grudgingly.

“Sindragosa was destroyed,” Jaina points out. “Ner’zhul really only has gargoyles left.”

“This is true,” Mograine agrees. “We did take out the majority, and Sindragosa being gone is an enormous victory for us.”

“I can take care of them,” Garrosh says, growling it like he’s hungry, his red eyes tracking them. “I can pull them down.” Sylvanas looks at him with eyes half-lidded, doubtful, Varian looks on with open disgust, and Thrall just becomes wary of this strange, foreign hunger. Jaina thinks for a moment.

“If you two can work on bringing them down, I can shield the ground forces,” she offers. Sylvanas and Varian grimace, still doubtful.

“If you are certain you can handle such a thing,” Fordring agrees. Jaina nods firmly, and steps onto the elevator, Garrosh on her heels and Sylvanas close behind.

“We’ll send the elevator back down when the top is clear enough,” Jaina instructs. Mograine squints at the three of them apprehensively, probably suspecting foul play on her and Garrosh’s part, perhaps even Sylvanas’. He hardly has room to talk, she thinks, irritation prickling down her neck.

“Understood,” Fordring agrees firmly, and Mograine’s eyes flick over to him, a little betrayed, but he doesn’t challenge the paladin’s judgment, nodding along reluctantly.

“I’ll come as well,” Thrall states, not quite a question but almost, still looking to Jaina and Garrosh for approval even as he stubbornly strides onto the platform. “I can help shield our forces as well.”

“Do you really think the elements would aid the likes of us? Last time I checked, they weren’t too fond of the undead,” Sylvanas asks, the side of her mouth stretching like she’s trying to smile, like she’s trying to make light of it, but it doesn’t quite make the shape it’s supposed to, and wilts before it ever really gets there.

“Yes,” he snaps stubbornly. “They will come when I call.”

“What makes you so sure of that?” she questions, eyes narrowing apprehensively.

“Because the cycle must be restored,” he replies. “They cannot ignore such a violent transgression against it if we stand to correct it.”

Sylvanas goes quiet again, thoughtful.

“We must go,” Jaina says. “Ready?” She glances to each of the people on the elevator pad with her, indomitable and resolute, and pulls the lever on the pad to send them up. Fordring gives them a salute, Mograine seeing this and following suit. Varian does as well, an odd little tip of his head towards Jaina as he does, his mouth a mournful crease, and she doesn’t really know how she feels about that.

The elevator starts with a loud creak, the metal complaining loudly as it lifts off the ground, and they watch as the people now below them become smaller and smaller until they’re finally out of sight, the walls of the elevator shaft surrounding them on all sides. It quiets a bit once it’s in constant motion, but still keeps the rhythmic sounds of the gears working and metal straining. She looks around at them again.

Garrosh is staring up still, completely unwavering and hands gripping his ready axes. Sylvanas looks up as well, every once in a while, while she prepares her bow and arrows, quickly dipping the sharp tips of them into a little satchel on her belt, reapplying poisons, no doubt. Thrall’s gaze flits between the three of them, pausing on Jaina when he notices her looking. Doomhammer is clutched in one hand, and in the other, a tower shield, the familiar gold and silver Argent Crusade sun decorating the front. He smiles at her, a tired little half-smirk that is somber but fond, and she says “We’ll get through this.”

He smiles a little brighter, and Sylvanas smirks, despite herself.

“Such an inspiration,” she snorts, teeth glinting in the dim light.

“We will,” Jaina asserts. “We’ll get through this.” Sylvanas snorts again.

“Maybe not in one piece, but we’ll get through it, all right,” she says. That’s the best compromise she’s going to give, Jaina thinks, and nods.

“Ready yourselves,” Garrosh growls, voice deep and strange. His eyes are glowing brighter, almost a glare compared to their usual low light, and Thrall startles at this, at the bestial sound accompanying it. He probably won’t appreciate the inevitable frenzy to follow.

Jaina looks up to find the gargoyles are close enough where she can see them almost completely, and inhales sharply, bringing a cold breath back into her lungs and letting it build as they near the top. Thrall goes still and silent, seemingly staring into nothing, and far off, there is a rumble of thunder, growing louder and louder as time goes on.

The elevator reaches the top, sliding into place with a loud, slow grind of screeching metal. Immediately, the gargoyles begin to swarm them, even before the elevator finishes moving, and Garrosh takes no time in grabbing them, ripping them in half, chopping them to bits. Sylvanas begins firing off sets of arrows at a time, her aim flawless and true, and not even watching as her targets plummet to the ground, just continuing to fire more arrows. Finally, on the split second between the next waves of them, Jaina’s mouth falls open, and from it blasts a shrieking gale of ice, encompassing the stone creatures that have come too close with a fast-spreading frost, cracking them open and breaking them apart in a matter of seconds.

Thrall pulls Sylvanas and Jaina under the tower shield, raising it to the sky when the shards of what used to be gargoyles begin to fall to the earth. He tries to get Garrosh, but he doesn’t appear to care, still continuing to pull down gargoyles and slay them mercilessly quickly even as the ice shards pierce through his armor and black blood begins to drip from the wounds, steam rising off him as they heal almost instantly. The shards stop falling after a few seconds, and Garrosh is already making his way across the rampart, dozens of iridescent shadow-hands streaking through the air from him and wrenching yet more gargoyles from the air, pulling them down to Garrosh and his terrible bloodrage. Sylvanas joins him, flitting out from under the shield and continuing her onslaught of arrows, catching the ones he misses. Stone shards and a strange, dark ichor litter the ground around them, marking a clear path of destruction.

Thrall does not lower the shield, still, and Jaina once again breathes in, bringing cold air into herself and releasing it as a gleaming white fog. It rises up from her open mouth and forms clouds above them, and Ner’zhul apparently is not stupid enough to send more through them, because the gargoyles are now wary of it. Thrall slowly lowers the shield when the clouds are large enough to cover the area above the elevator shaft, and when he begins to summon clouds of his own, staring into the distance and going still while a gust of wind whips his long, dark hair around him and the thunder grows louder and louder, Jaina runs back to the elevator platform and pulls the lever, sending it back down.

The sound of the screeching gears seems to prompt their foes back into action, and while they do not fly straight through the storm building around them, they do try to fly around it, trying to circumvent it altogether by flying farther away and then lower, approaching the two of them on their level. However, the storm clouds that Thrall has summoned do not take kindly to this, and sure enough, lightning streaks through the air, glaring and white-hot. Its aim isn’t perfect, no, but it’s enough to give them pause, enough to catch the unwary and electrify them, jolting long-dead muscles down to their very sinews. Moreover, it’s certainly enough for Jaina to begin firing ice daggers through their charred wings and charred bodies, the battered, animated stone shattering upon impact.

They continue with this for some time, and soon, Thrall leaves the storm to build independently, whipping itself into a tempest with streaks of white-purple lightning flashing through the clouds. He takes the Doomhammer in hand, and joins the melee himself, the ring of his weapon making contact with the gargoyles’ rock-skin resounding like an earthquake. Jaina doesn’t know how long it’s been, time simultaneously going too fast and too slow, but the elevator platform is at the top once again, and Ashen Verdict forces are now all around them, crossbows in hand. They begin firing at will, gargoyles dropping from the sky like gnats, and she can only imagine Ner’zhul’s fury at this, watching her through the eyes of hundreds as they pick off each and every one of them.

More time passes, blurry as she darts between the crusaders frantically, trying not to consume them with her frost as she continues to attack their foes, and soon the elevator has risen again with more forces, this time with spears and tower shields, and between them, a battering ram they seem to be guarding with their lives. These ones move swiftly up the rampart to join Garrosh and Sylvanas’ onslaught. Jaina inhales, breathes in deep, breathes in the storm she and Thrall have conjured together, and bids it to spread its clouds further down the path, bids that in her wrath it protects them from the wrath of her former master.

They continue like this for ages, seemingly, until Jaina is nothing but patterns of action; ice daggers, then pulling the lever, then dodging their foes, dodging their allies, ice daggers again, pulling the lever again. In fact she is still in the midst of this pattern, unthinkingly bound to it and frost in her hands, when the Ashen Verdict forces finally finish coming up the elevator. She slows to a stop from her firing when Thrall grabs her by the shoulder, starkly aware of the pause in this action and some subconscious part of her still prompting to continue when he pulls her by the hand across the rampart to join the others. Even now, the gargoyles’ swarm is endless, she and Thrall still having to work their ice storm as they run, more than once individuals getting too close.

Garrosh and Sylvanas have left a stream of death in their wake, rock splinters and chunks littering the path on both sides and the odd dark, ichor cooling quickly and becoming a strange, congealing ice-sludge in the cold air. They made it to the large door on the other side, and were busy still with their slaughter while the soldiers hurried on back into the citadel and away from the endless swarm of gargoyles. The door is bent and hanging crookedly on its hinges, forced open by their intrusion.

Jaina does not enter until she has seen every last person make it in, much to Garrosh’s loud, angry growling, and when she does, she walks backwards into it facing the outside, exhaling an invasive miasma that clings to the archway and freezes over it until the ice is thick and juts out every which way, and the only thing that they hear of the gargoyles is a muffled and distant flapping, the faint sound of their furious squawking and trying to claw through the ice.

Thrall examines the makeshift glacier warily, and Jaina says, “It will hold. We must move quickly.”

Fordring and Mograine are already leading their soldiers further in, light flashing from the paladin’s every move and the movement of the light-favored soldiers. Jaina squints, blinded by it, and Thrall doesn’t even blink, like he hasn’t seen it at all. For a split second, there is a phantom pain streaking up her belly, and a great chasm carved into her body. She blinks, and it is gone. If she is meant to be a vessel, if there is meant to be a black hole just under her ribs and through her back, a nest for ghosts stuck between this place and the next, then she will choose what she will be a vessel for. She will choose what she carries.

She keeps moving forward, storm in her breath and lightning behind her teeth.

\---

The battering ram gets put to use again when they get stuck behind yet another door.

They’ve been moving quickly through the citadel, as quickly as they can trying to get to the throne, and with Jaina and Garrosh knowing exactly where everything is, it only moves them faster. Unfortunately, Ner’zhul knows that they know, and can predict what routes they will take, and has already mounted a defense against them. Hence, the battering ram fulfilling its purpose once more.

They were about to cross into the upper end of the citadel when they found themselves in front of a door once again, a large, imposing wall of black metal, and while this may be a simple challenge by itself, Ner’zhul’s followers have been putting up barriers on every entrance they’ve come across, layers upon layers of enchanted walls of ice to slow them, and there was little doubt that they did the same for this one. They’re alright for now, they’ve cleared out a safe little pocket to linger while they attempt to bash through the door, but they’re still tense, still on guard. They’ve only been at it a few minutes and it still feels like too long, the guards fidgeting at their posts.

The rhythmic crashing of the battering ram against the door is constant enough that she stops being consciously aware of it, somehow growing used to the loudness of the wood and metal attempting to burst through the saronite door, and the ice beyond. In the meantime, the Ashen Verdict is tending to their wounded, patching them up the best they can, given the circumstances. The elder Saurfang has somehow made it up here in one piece, Garrosh still trailing after him like a guilty dog, and is still at odds with the healers, who clearly aren’t pleased that he has somehow managed to strap a shield to the arm whose hand is missing. She thinks Garrosh had something to do with that, seeing as he won’t meet the healers’ glares as they scold both Saurfang and him. She doesn’t remember seeing him while she and Thrall were defending the entrance to the elevator, but she also doesn’t really remember seeing specific people pass by, too lost in her actions to really notice. He probably passed right on by and she just didn’t see him.

“Stubborn old bastard, isn’t he?” comes Varian’s voice, just to her left. She turns, and there he is, standing slightly too far to the side, not looking at her for the most part and being terribly awkward and obvious when he does. His eyes dart between her and the old orc, awaiting her answer.

“Quite,” she replies after a moment, and he seems to deflate somewhat, not seeming strung so tightly. “I don’t blame him.” Varian nods, not quite eagerly because there’s bags under his eyes and his shoulders are still stiff, but still clearly happy to hear her speak. She doesn’t really know what to say after that, and neither does he, apparently, because when she falls silent he doesn’t reply with anything, shifting uncomfortably in the silence that follows. He’s looking at her from out of the corner of his eye, brows drawn close like he can’t find anything. The tension that radiates from him is infectious, apparently, because she too becomes anxious in this silence between them, acutely aware of the activity going on around them.

“Do you need something?” she begins to say, but she doesn’t get past the word ‘need’ before Varian asks, like it’s bursting out of him:

“Are you still in there?”

She stops, turns to look at him, and he’s cringing, yes, but it doesn’t stop him from looking at her like he’s still searching for something, eyes dark and fervent and mouth drawn down tightly.

“I mean, are you still… _you_ , Jaina?” he tries again, clearer this time but no less awkward. Another moment of silence ticks by, Varian growing more and more anxious as she takes her time in answering.

“I don’t really know how to answer that,” she replies earnestly. His face falls, and she feels a faint stab of guilt in her stomach. “I don’t know; I don’t think anyone could be the same after… that,” she explains, and this seems to pacify him a bit, though he still stares at her, waiting for answers she’s not sure she can give.

“I’m what’s left, I think,” she continues slowly, reaching for whatever she can give him. “I still. I still remember what I was before. This,” she pauses, waggling her fingers as frost forms over her too-pale skin. “I’m just not sure if that’s who I am now. I don’t think I can go back to being that.”

He won’t stop staring at her, as nearly as avid and desperate as the cultists who revered her.

“I’m not sure what it is you’re expecting from me, but,” she starts again. “I will still be your friend, if you don’t mind whatever I am now.”

This apparently satisfies him, because relief and mourning streak through him simultaneously, turning and grabbing her shoulders with both hands and getting inches away from her face. He doesn’t embrace her, exactly, but he still pulls her in close, hardly any space between them and his hands shaking on her shoulders, his head falling forward sluggishly and his forehead brushing against hers. He opens his mouth, perhaps attempting to speak, but what comes out is a strangled gasp, overburdened with emotion and muffled behind his teeth. It’s a distant sort of realization, learning the sort of effect her death had on the people around her. Idly, she wonders how long she’d been gone, exactly, that her return warrants this sort of reaction. She hardly thinks herself so important.

However, she gets no time to react properly; they are interrupted by the screech of metal warping under stress. The battering ram has finally broken through the door.

In an instant, the soldiers are up and ready, falling into formation. Varian just short of throws himself away from her, sword in hand, and nods at her awkwardly before joining them. Later, then, she supposes. She quickly trots up to the front, peering into the crevice of bent saronite. Just as they thought, ice lay beyond, and while they did a good job of forcing the door open, it wasn’t by much, their path still impeded by enchanted glaciers. Still, it would not be long until they would break through to the other side. She backs away from the entrance, giving room to the few mages among them to cast their fire. She would join them, but she’s not sure she can cast fire anymore without it being a shadow-flame, reeking of sulfur, and she doesn’t really want to subject anyone to that.

The heat of their flames is searing, and Jaina might have to give them a bit more room that most would. She can’t stop thinking that she’s going to melt, frustrated with her own irrationality. Still, seeing the wall of flame steadily eat away at the ice, water trickling onto the floor, hits a little bit too close to home, for some reason. She hasn’t really thought about what’s going to happen after this, and she doesn’t really know how to live outside the citadel anymore, made a tenant to its cold. She doesn’t know if she can, anymore, and what if she can’t? What if becoming this ice creature has made her too weak to stand any form of heat, and she can’t go back? What if, by some slim chance, they do manage to take down her former master, and she can’t actually leave, cursed to guard her own prison and made to act the dragon to any wayward adventurers who might try and disturb the fortress?

 _A fitting end_ , she thinks bitterly. _A queen who can’t leave her castle_.

However, she isn’t given much more time to ruminate on this further, as the mages (volunteers and adventurers, she thinks, Dalaran still busy trying to close up the fetid pit that was Ulduar to send any more of their own) begin to move forward as the ice grows thinner and thinner. The Ashen Verdict moves into formation, Fordring and Mograine at the front, and Thrall and Varian just behind. Garrosh is on Thrall’s other side, growling at the High King not too subtly while Sylvanas, close by, barely holds in her snickering. It’s the only sound in the room currently, aside from the dripping water and the crackling mage-fire. It’s a warning, mostly, because Garrosh is nothing if not a vicious guard dog, and Varian is standing too close to Thrall, he probably thinks. Saurfang shoots him a warning look and he grudgingly quiets.

Jaina isn’t really sure where to stand, but knows full well she shouldn’t be in the thick of the crowd, her magic too dangerous for her to risk it. She trudges to the front, a step ahead of Mograine and Fordring. Mograine doesn’t appreciate this, clearly, looking as if he’d just eaten something sour, but Fordring just watches on curiously.

“If there’s someone on the other side, I don’t want anyone to get caught in the blast,” Jaina explains, mist already seeping out of her mouth. Fordring nods in understanding, light twinkling around him like a veil of fallen stars. She feels a little better in seeing Mograine flinch at this, too, even if Thrall and Varian don’t. She gazes straight ahead again, vision tinted blue at the edges as her very breath turns to ice.

Shapes begin to form on the other side of the ice, a mad, muffled cackling becoming louder as the glacier melts, and Jaina knows who lay in waiting on the other side.

Dranosh is _furious_.

Within the same second that the mages have cleared away the ice, they are very nearly overrun with scourge soldiers, death knights and trainees alike. The hallway is clogged with them immediately, and Jaina takes no time in bombarding them with ice, clouds in her palms that rip away from her fingers as tempests, the howl of wind deafening. It drowns out their screeches as the ice coats the walls and floor and twists into sharp, nightmarish shapes, piercing straight through those too unlucky to dodge it. It doesn’t get all of them, not by a long shot, but it startles them long enough that they can move down the hallway and into the chamber on the other side, fighting the entire way.

It was a store room the last time Jaina had seen it, but it seems to have been hastily outfitted as a defense post for their former comrades to hole out in, shelves emptied and turned over to act as barricades as foot soldiers rush in and spellcasters take potshots at them from behind the makeshift shelter. She cannot see Dranosh just yet, but she knows he is here, knows he is furious as his laughter carries over the clash of metal and the ringing of spells soaring over their heads. She doesn’t do much besides defend herself, fog curling around her limbs and freezing those that get too close; her magic is too dangerous to use in this closed a space. She was made to be an unending blizzard, and she will not risk herself or her allies to live up to this purpose, even if that means having to listen to them suffer while she frantically searches for Dranosh in the chaos.

Garrosh and the elder Saurfang find Dranosh before she does. The Deathbringer cannot stop laughing as his father and once-brother seek to pin him in a corner, laughing at his father and his shield and his one hand, laughing at Garrosh’s snarling as he strikes with his axes and not a single hit lands, laughing, laughing, laughing.

“Do you seek to save me, father?” he baits, chuckling even through this. “Do you think I will be as easily saved as Hellscream was?” He says nothing else; Saurfang has charged by then, eyes pulsing red and glowing, and bashed his son’s head with the corner of his shield. Dranosh reels back, black blood dripping down his face, and laughs and laughs and laughs. There is no joy to it, no happiness, all spite and rage.

“Come, then,” he baits, mouth twisted into a horrible grin and blood dripping onto his teeth. “Put me out of my misery.” Garrosh charges, roaring, and Saurfang is right behind him, silent as the grave. Dranosh laughs. He won’t stop laughing.

The mist curling around her limbs begins to solidify, chain links emerging from the fog and clinking together as they rotate lazily around her arm. She extends one arm toward them, and the chain flies towards Dranosh, coiling around his ankle with an unseen speed and yanking him back hard enough to make him stumble. In a split second, the terrible cackling ceases, startling Dranosh into silence as he is very nearly pulled to the floor. He catches his balance just as soon after, snarling, but it’s enough for Saurfang to knock his axe from his hands, enough for it to go skidding across the floor and out of his reach. It disappears into the battle, lost among the soldiers, and when he reaches for it, only to be met with Garrosh blocking him off and another one of her chains clinging to his other ankle, this breaks something in him, she thinks, watching his expression go dark in an instant.

“Do you mean to tame me as well, Frostwitch?” he hisses, lips still trying to stretch back into that terrible grin even as he visibly fights against it. “Are you going to make me another one of your pets?”

She says, “You are no one’s pet,” and something zips past her ear, whistling shrilly as it passes and sticks into Dranosh’s neck like a thorn. Blood does not burst from the wound as it should, instead oozing sluggishly while he coughs and sputters wetly, unable to speak any longer with an arrow in his throat. He pulls and pulls but can’t get it out, and when she whirls around, it’s Sylvanas who has another arrow notched and ready on her bow, it’s Sylvanas who now has Garrosh and Saurfang’s ire.

“The poison should take hold any minute now,” she clarifies hastily, snapping her sharp teeth in response to Garrosh baring his. Saurfang is indescribably furious, and says, very, very calmly, almost ominously so, “If my son does not come back, I’ll have your head.”

Sylvanas proves to be correct; despite Dranosh’s frantic struggling, he cannot get it out, and his movements begin to begin to become sluggish and weak until he finally falls to his knees. His father is there before he can even fall back, and when he does, Saurfang catches him, holds him in his arms and watches the blue light of his son’s eyes slowly flicker out while black blood dribbles out the corners of his mouth. Finally, Dranosh falls limp, and she can see something in Saurfang wither away and die with him.

“Sylvanas, the phylactery,” Jaina states mechanically, gradually becoming more and more desensitized. It’s hard to think above the clatter of metal on metal, above the ringing in her ears. She can’t quite look at Sylvanas, but reaches her hand out towards her anyway, and the neck of the bottle manifests in her hands, long, cold fingers already wrapped around it. She doesn’t remember running but she’s suddenly at Dranosh’s feet all the same, gently shooing away Saurfang. Saurfang won’t move.

“No,” he croaks, wretched as he grips Dranosh closer. “I was kept away from my other son, I will not be kept away from this one.” Sylvanas sighs irritably, fingers tightening around the neck of the bottle until they’re trembling with hurt envy. Jaina reluctantly nods, but still runs her thumb over Sylvanas’ knuckles, comforting in what way she can. Her grip loosens marginally.

“At least let us take the arrow out,” Sylvanas compromises, albeit resentfully. Saurfang has about the same sentiment, but still allows Jaina to approach. She gives the arrow a tentative tug and predictably, it doesn’t budge.

“Let me do it,” Garrosh snaps, unceremoniously shoving her out of the way and yanking it out. Saurfang is a mix between dumbstruck at his audacity and looking like he is genuinely considering him strangling him. Miraculously, he gets the whole thing out in one pull, unbroken, but he also rips out a considerable amount of flesh as well. Before Saurfang has a chance to follow through with that urge, however, Garrosh gathers up the bits of flesh in his hand and presses it into the wound, staring intently at it until steam rises from under his palm, hissing. When he pulls his hand away, there is no wound at all.

“We have no time for this, not when I can fix it,” he explains gruffly. “Just bring him back to us.” So she does.

Sylvanas pops open the bottle easily. Wrapping her hand back around the phylactery and Sylvanas’ fingers, she breathes in, closes her eyes, and breathes out. There is sight in this breath, there is knowing, and before her appears the strand of his soul, a glowing blue so pale it is almost white. This is not how it should be, this she knows for certain, this white is not purity, this white is not cleansing. With her own too-pale fingers, she takes it and pulls. Deathwhisper’s phylactery bubbles and smokes, though not as intensely as it did before, and Jaina pulls again. The blue darkens.

Dranosh’s felled body jerks suddenly, startling his father, jerks again as if he were tossing and turning from a nightmare. Not once does Saurfang let go, however, holding him firmly all throughout his violent thrashing, until finally his eyelids fly open and he inhales raggedly. His eyes rove around the room quickly but warily, in disbelief, particularly when they land on Saurfang. Saurfang himself is just so _relieved_ , holding his son to his chest like it’s all he has.

“Come,” Garrosh barks impatiently, and this seems to jar the two Saurfangs back into the present. He pulls the both of them to their feet, Dranosh first, then Varok. He gives Dranosh one of his axes, and this action seems to be what finally makes this real for Dranosh. He looks to Garrosh, a strange sort of anger blooming across his face, one that still has the spark of mischief, mean as a poltergeist and just as spiteful. They run back into the battle, and Jaina for a split second has the image of them as children running into the woods under her eyelids.

“Thank you,” Saurfang rasps gravely.

\---

You still see things that you shouldn’t. When you close your eyes, in the fraction of a second before they close completely, you can still see the threads.

This ability wasn’t one that you had before you became this creature; you had only received it because your former master deemed fit to bestow it upon you, and you’re not so sure that you should still have it, now that you have been severed from him. You’re not so sure that you should be seeing the things you are seeing, but that apparently doesn’t stop you from seeing, all the same. You see yours, always, and Garrosh’s as well, a tangle of white and gold just behind your eyes (flashes of his thoughts, two children running into the woods where the trees are the only things keeping the land from crumbling into the sky), but you can also see the strands of the people around you, vividly if you try, and faintly whether you like it or not. It’s not as though the dark spaces present when you close your eyes are no longer there, lit up by the glow of souls; the iridescent black had always been there, and now the colors were just clearer, you somehow seeing them, even through the dark.

The souls of those all around you are at a mere fingertip’s reach, and it’s a jittery thought, wondering if this is how Ner’zhul saw things, how he was able to and how long, wondering if you, too, will be cursed with this sight until someone comes to cut you down. You don’t want to be the sort of monster he turned out to be, but you don’t deny that you are one, or how laughably easy it would be to pluck at these strands, one by one, until you had woven them all into yourself as he had. It’s all too tempting just to reach out and touch, just to see, and how much easier would it be to protect those that you loved if you could just bind them to yourself? You are scared of yourself.

This is not the monster you wanted to be. You didn’t want to be a monster at all, but still you find yourself in a dark forest, in a house made of sweets. You are the witch in the woods, and someone will come and cut you down, eventually, because that it what happens to witches, even if they were only acting because their house was consumed. This is what happened to Ner’zhul, and what will inevitably happen to you, and the only sympathy you’ll receive is that it came to this, and not for what made you a witch in the first place.

When the cord to your master was cut, you didn’t lose the memories that flooded your head. These memories are not yours, jarringly so, but you still see them as if you were there, see them as if you were him. You see how Ner’zhul became this creature, how he was tricked into damning his own people by creatures older and cleverer than him eating away at his home. Ner’zhul became the witch, slowly, resentfully, until finally these creatures stuck him in a house of sweets of his very own and he ensnared his own travelers. No one will mourn this Ner’zhul, an ill-fated old seer betrayed; they will only mourn what he has done. The witch will receive no pity. You won’t, either.


	7. Chapter 7

They find Muradin sprinting down a hallway sometime later.

When Dranosh was returned to them, he offered his former comrades a way out. Jaina wasn’t entirely sure if it was possible, but perhaps the shock of having their commander ripped out right from under them gave them some way to break away from their king, however fleeting. Some accepted his offer, but not many, and he was quick to turn on those who didn’t. (Among those that did, Jaina can recognize the thin, curly-haired trainee whose head she drifted through briefly, and they glance between she and Dranosh with a wary sort of hope. She doesn’t know what she’s supposed to say to them.) After the ensuing slaughter at his and Garrosh’s hands within the storeroom, they resume their attack, moving quickly through the citadel.

Muradin is a mere glimpse down the hallway they tread before dashing out of sight, and their pursuit of him leads them down a winding path of routes in the fortress she wasn’t even aware of, through hidden doors and secret rooms. By the time they corner him, he has led them to a part of the upper citadel that she doesn’t recognize. It’s just so odd because yes, certainly the scourge leaves forces in place to stop them as well as traps lying in wait for them at every turn, swarms of arrows and axes flying through the air, but Muradin never quite gets out of their range, always managing to be very nearly caught right after they deal with the skeleton soldiers, and always managing to get away. It’s obviously deliberate, but they are already lost and didn’t have much choice to follow him to begin with.

Finally, finally, they corner him, at the end of a hallway, doors lining either side but seemingly going nowhere, seeing as he isn’t bothering to weasel his way through them. He apparently realizes this too late, and is coming back up the hallway when they actually get within spitting distance of him.

Varian is the one who catches him, just barely, rounding the corner right as Muradin is, and the dwarf freezes in place when he sees Jaina, shock on his face like this is a surprise somehow.

“Y’ shouldn’t have come,” Muradin slurs, voice thick and runeblades clenched in his fists. A sickly green glow clings to the edge of the swords, and his skin is wan and sallow, hair too red, too bright for the rest of him now. He says nothing else, and with a speed she’s never seen, he’s already grappling with Varian, the warrior-king struggling to keep his sword in his hands as Muradin brandishes his own against them. The edges of the diseased blades are perilously close to Varian, she notes with panic, and when she attempts to cast chains upon him, unthinking, they do not catch him but he does back off.

She has never actually seen Muradin fight and she is terrified of what he could possibly be capable of doing, if the gift that manifested in him when he was arisen is the touch of sickness. She cannot let him get one touch on anyone, let alone fight anyone, lest yet more are stripped away and added to the scourge ranks like she was. He lands in front of Thrall, next, but Garrosh cuts him off, and soon, he and Dranosh are chasing him back down the hall. Garrosh isn’t as nearly as fast as Muradin, to be sure, but he can drag him back by his ankles if only he can the grip of his shadowy hands on him. Dranosh can outpace Garrosh easily, but cannot reach Muradin, still, instead attempting to steer Muradin towards Garrosh’s shade-hands.

Muradin leads them back the way they came, halfway down the hallway and into one of the doors, and without thinking, she, runs in after him, chain links at her fingertips. She notices, as she races after him and the Ashen Verdict forces pile in behind her, that the grand hall he has led them into is pointedly different from the rest of the citadel she’s seen, mostly used to the ground floor and the cultist’s quarters. Here, the walls and floor are decorated opulently, long, patterned rugs and intricate, delicate-looking chandeliers on each. It doesn’t make it welcoming in any sense, only to serve making the environment somehow more eerie, all dark, too-saturated reds and screamingly bright greens and yellows. She chases him up a long stairway, scourge soldiers flooding in behind them, and soon, it is just her relentlessly chasing him up the winding steps, her every attempt to chain him dodged effortlessly.

She knows she’s being led away on purpose, but if she could just catch him, then it wouldn’t matter, and she could just drag him back, if only she could just catch him-

They arrive at the top of the stairwell, in an open, circular chamber, empty save for a throne set up on the far side of it, and the strange entity sitting on said throne.

Lana’thel smirks, her lips curling over her unnaturally sharp canines, and Muradin tells her again, “Y’ shouldn’t have come.” Her leathery wings flutter, fanning out and stretching leisurely as she stands up from the chair, and their shadow falls over Jaina like the shadow of a great bird of prey.

“Will you come quietly, then?” she asks, her voice silk, and Jaina for a moment feels a strange compulsion to obey, taken by the desire that voice instills in her. The Blood Queen is so, so beautiful, wretchedly so, her features becoming distorted when she looks at her for too long. She wants to, she wants to please her and do everything she can to do so, but there is an underlying hunger to her words, something that pulls hard at her, and Jaina cannot help but tense up with an instinctive fear. Lana’thel means to make her prey, and she is tired of being followed by wolves, of wearing red cloaks.

Frost begins to coat her fingers, creeping up her arm as the clouds surrounding them thicken, and she says nothing. The Blood Queen smiles wider, the gesture stretching her features too far and revealing far too many teeth. Yet she remains beautiful, always beautiful and dreadfully so, hideously so.

“So be it,” she says impassively, tone singsong and her tongue far too red, and launches herself into the air with a flick of her expansive wings. Jaina has nary a moment before Muradin is darting after her, armor getting nicked by his runeblades before her frost can overtake them. He recoils as ice creeps up the sullied metal, but it’s only seconds again before he comes after her. She is ready for him, this time, and he can’t get in a hit this time, the clouds around her too thick and the crunch of ice loud as it crystalizes over the swords and his hands. Trying to break off the ever-creeping ice will keep him occupied, but not for long, and already the Blood Queen is midway through materializing a firestorm.

The ceiling is obscured by the black-purple smog whirling around it, and at the center lay the Blood Queen, continuing to whip it into a frenzy.

“Our King instructed us to be gentle when we returned you to him, but I’m sure he won’t mind if you have a _few_ bruises,” she simpers, and fireballs rain down on her. Muradin is struggling still with the ice-growth on the other side of the room, near the stairway and away from the flames, and for this small mercy Jaina is thankful, but she has too little time to shield herself, screeching out in pain as dark flames graze her arm. It immediately sears through the sleeve, leaving her pale flesh charred and blackened very nearly to the bone, but the spikes of pain and panic in her ribs spark something in her belly, and there’s a thick shell of ice around her before she can even blink, instinct taking hold.

She can’t catch her breath, despite her lack of the need for it, falling to her knees inside the little bubble she’s made for herself and gasping as the pain shudders through her. She won’t be able to concentrate if this pain doesn’t cease, and so she blows out a cold puff of air into her unburned hand, running it down the arm whose burnt flesh is mangled and just short of hanging off the bone. Rime fills the spaces seared away, numbing the pain until it’s just a dull throbbing. She can’t let herself die here, no, not when she could be used to harm so many, and that thought is so, so strange when for months all she wished for was to be returned to her shroud of sleep and rest.

_If I am meant to be a witch, then that is what I shall be,_ she thinks to herself, the only coherent thought she has. She breathes in, and a blizzard fills her lungs. The ice shell cracks.

When it shatters, the shards fly in every direction, cutting through the air and all that they touch. The Blood Queen shrieks as they pierce her wings, her body, and as she falls to the ground, the firestorm begins to dissipate. Her body crashes against the floor noisily, limbs splayed and joints bent in odd angles from the long, thick splinters of ice sticking out of her. Her crown- a headdress, red and green and grey- falls off her head, and clatters across the floor. Her wings twitch, but they’re both hanging limply as she lays on her back and wheezes out chuckling. Lana’thel’s eyes, deep, black pits of ink, stop being able to focus on Jaina so much, and eventually, she stills and quiets, eyes staring straight ahead. The room is quiet save for the racket of battle carrying up the stairs, a distant and muffled echo, and when she turns to face Muradin, the ice has encased him fully. There is no sign of life from within, and the arm held together by hoarfrost feels like dead weight hanging from her shoulder. She underestimated herself, apparently.

The silence doesn’t last for long, though, and soon, people are running up the stairs. Garrosh is first, awash with gore and still half-mad with bloodlust, and he is followed by Sylvanas, looking harried as she carefully skirts the carnage trailing behind him. Garrosh takes one look at her arm, at Muradin and Lana’thel, and his fury blooms anew, rumbling angrily as he stomps over to her. He’s trembling, though be it from rage or worry is unclear.

“I’m alright,” she says before he can say anything.

“Don’t you _ever_ fucking run off like that again,” he scolds, loudly. He takes her left arm, frostbitten and half-formed, and it’s scorching under his hands. He grunts once, and the ice melts, pain shooting up the remains of her arm yet again. It’s fleeting, however, as steam begins rising from the exposed bone and muscle, absorbing the blood and gore dripping off of Garrosh’s armor into the wounds and reforming under his touch. She flexes her fingers, her entire arm thrumming warmly, and he lets go, seemingly satisfied with it. The sleeve is wrecked beyond repair, but she doesn’t really mind that so much.

Sylvanas is examining the ice-encased Muradin, squinting at it shrewdly as she circles him.

“How did you…?” she trails off. Jaina shrugs, and Sylvanas sighs.

“Well, we could still theoretically pour the poison down his throat, but I’m not sure how effective that it would be, given that he’s already dead,” she suggests in a manner that suggests more that she is absolutely done and would much rather leave. Jaina agrees. Still, she bids the frost consuming Muradin to break, and so it does, cracking into large chunks and falling to the floor with a flick of her finger. Muradin does not follow suit, body stiff with cold and stuck in place with the lingering rime.

“We won’t know until we try,” Jaina replies, and Sylvanas rolls her eyes yet still helps her as she begins to lay Muradin out on the floor. He’s still stiff as anything, but the remaining ice breaks further under her touch, leaving him marginally more flexible. Gently, Jaina pries open his mouth with both hands, and Sylvanas retrieves a vial from her belt, letting a few drops of its contents drip onto his tongue. It sizzles as it impacts, and Sylvanas speedily puts it away, replacing it with the phylactery.

“Alright, let’s see what you can do,” she says, offering Jaina the bottle. Wrapping her fingers around the neck of it, Jaina glances around quickly, and finds Garrosh keeping guard near the stairs. She relaxes somewhat, popping the cork of the bottle off with her thumb. It’s about two thirds full, still; there should be enough.

Once again, she looks into that iridescent dark, looks until she can trace the length of Muradin’s thread, long, tangled green twine. A rich, forest green before, perhaps, but now garish and sickly, knotted in on itself until it was too taut to untangle. With careful hands, she undoes only one knot; the one linking him to the great mass of souls. The end of it falls away out of her sight, and now done, she pulls it back towards herself. She knows Muradin has returned when there is a wracking cough.

She opens her eyes and glances down at him, and he can’t get himself to stop neither coughing nor shivering. Hand on his shoulder, she helps him sit up.

“Bloody hell,” he wheezes finally after catching his breath. “Y’ don’t really fuck around, do ye?” She shrugs, avoiding his gaze.

“Are you done?” Garrosh barks peevishly. Jaina gets up, helping Muradin to his feet, but Sylvanas says:

“Wait.”

Jaina turns back around, and Sylvanas is looking at Lana’thel’s battered corpse with something akin to desperation. She tilts her head at her questioningly.

“Could you bring her back as well?” Sylvanas asks in a small voice. “I mean. Theoretically. Could you?” She’s trying to say this as if she doesn’t mean it, clearly, but she wants too abruptly and too badly to hide it too well. Muradin groans exasperatedly.

“Did you know her?” Jaina asks.

“No,” she admits. “But she is my kin. I cannot leave her like this.” She doesn’t say much else, and Jaina wonders if when she looks at Lana’thel, she sees something else. Jaina glances back at Lana’thel. Thinks for a moment. (Frost Queen, Blood Queen, Witch Queen.)

She raises a hand, and the ice splinters in Lana’thel shatter. Muradin grumbles something off-color under his breath.

“Listen, lass,” he starts. “Lana’thel has been here longer than any of us. How do we know she wasn’t completely brainwashed?” Jaina thinks for another moment. (Banshee Queen.)

“We will give her a choice,” Jaina compromises. “If she stands with us, then so be it. But if she doesn’t, then we will ensure that no one commits such an atrocity to her ever again.” She turns to Garrosh who grunts irritably in time for Muradin to hiss “For fuck’s sake,” but Garrosh comes over, anyway. He regards Jaina like she’s really, truly, trying his patience.

Jaina says, “Please,” and Garrosh doesn’t even dignify that with a response. He still kneels and places a hand on Lana’thel, however, and before their eyes, her flesh knits itself back together. Her blood recedes back into closing wounds, her bones lurch back into place, and steam rises from her fallen body. When Garrosh gets up, he stumbles slightly, but he rights himself before Jaina has a chance to help him.

“Are you alright?” she checks.

“Just dizzy,” he replies, eyes a bit unfocused. He shakes his head. “I’m fine.” Mollified, Jaina turns back to Lana’thel. Sylvanas is already kneeling at Lana’thel’s shoulder, emptying a vial into her mouth. She looks to back to Jaina, looking skittish as she restlessly drums her fingers on the phylactery.

“Will we have enough for Fordragon?” Garrosh asks, and Sylvanas nods impatiently.

“I wouldn’t worry about that so much,” Muradin warns. “He’s in a much worse state than we are.”

Jaina seats herself next to the Banshee Queen, and grasps her hand around the bottleneck. She closes her eyes.

Sylvanas’ thread is still bright, still red, and still coiled up on itself like an agitated snake. Lana’thel’s is red as well, but so dark and oily that it’s practically black. It is perfectly straight, it is dripping with sludge, and it is not supposed to be red. Is this what happens, she wonders, if one spends too long a time under the rule of the Lich King? Lana’thel was not the first queen crowned, but she was certainly the longest under his reign. For a moment, Jaina has doubts, but when she reaches out and touches, runs her fingers through the muck trying to find the strand, she is greeted with smooth, white bark and rolling, green hills; towering, white spires and leaves like fire. She imagines that if she were to reach out to Sylvanas, she would be met with something similar.

The sludge gets smeared all over her fingers, and in the spot where she manages to wipe it away, Lana’thel’s thread is amber. She tightens her grip around it and pulls. The Blood Queen awakens.

Her rousing is a tiny gasp of a breath, shaky and thin, and her chest giving a feeble shudder as she inhales. Of course, this is when the rest of their forces finally catch up with them, and as she and Sylvanas help Lana’thel sit up, through the punctured holes in her clothing reveal grey, pallid flesh, almost stone-like in appearance.

“First you kill me, and then you try to save me?” she teases, voice barely above a whisper. “You’re an odd one, Frostwitch.” Jaina turns, and sees both Mograine and Fordring standing at the front, the death knight covered in blood and looking grim, and the paladin intrigued, but guarded mostly. The Light curled around him seems to be regarding them curiously, but she can’t know for sure when she can’t look at him for too long without her eyes straining. They both look exhausted.

“Lana’thel,” Jaina starts before anyone can say anything. “Will you stand with us against the Lich King?” In an instant, all of Lana’thel’s good humor is gone, expression warped with discontent.

“You should have left me dead,” she jeers. Eyes roving the room and regarding the people in front of them, she continues, “But since you went to so much trouble to bring me back, well. I suppose I could lend a hand.”

“What of your children, Blood Queen?” Sylvanas probes, chomping at the bit. “Will the San’layn stand with us as well?” Mograine watches the once-elf wearily, blue eyes too bright in the dimly lit room.

“Some of them, perhaps,” she replies. “They are no longer bound to me; only to my lieutenants. I do not know for certain.”

“And your lieutenants, the Blood Princes?” Sylvanas tries. A grin stretches across Lana’thel’s face, revealing her sharpened teeth, and she chuckles, the soft, melodic sound clashing harshly against the set of her jaw and her narrowed eyes.

“No,” she replies again, the thin veil of playfulness failing to conceal the ire underneath. “They wanted power, and the Lich King gave it to them. They chose this fate.” Sylvanas’ face goes blank for a moment, skipping from pain and distress straight to this numb shock, before gradually slipping into something she is more accustomed to; varying shades of murderous. Jaina, for a moment, fears for them, but it’s brief; the retribution that Sylvanas will deliver onto them will be everything they deserve.

“Then our next goal is clear,” Sylvanas begins, charged with energy and looking like she may very well vibrate out of her own body.

“We do not have the time for that,” Mograine asserts. “We must keep pushing forward to the throne.” Sylvanas whips around to glower at him, defensive.

“Do you think that they will leave us be when we’ve just taken away their queen?” she retorts. “They could be here any minute. It would be better to strike them down while they’re still reeling from it.”

“We need to stick to the plan,” he argues. “We got what we needed- we shouldn’t linger.”

“Standing around bickering isn’t going to help much, either,” Muradin points out, much to Sylvanas’ chagrin. He turns to Fordring. “Listen- let me and the lass take care of this. We don’t need to split up the whole damn army, we just need us two. We’ll be more than enough for the likes of them.” Mograine turns to him, prickly now that Sylvanas has picked a fight with him, but too tired to really, truly fight.

“I hardly think you have the authority to give commands anymore, Bronzebeard,” he snaps. “You were under the Lich King’s control up until now- why should we listen to you?” Muradin opens his mouth to protest, halfway through the first word, but stops.

“Well, you got me there, lad,” he allows.

“Let’s hear him out, Darion,” Fordring suggests evenly, and Mograine sighs through his nose, tired and at his wit’s end. Somehow, despite his beard and the bags under his eyes, he still looks so young.

It’s not really something that she picked up on immediately, but now that she sees them side by side, Jaina notices how much smaller he is than him. Height-wise, he’s not really neither tall nor short, and Fordring is remarkably tall, to be fair, but Mograine still looks so small, somehow. His armor is plenty bulky, same as Fordring’s, but whereas Fordring’s seem to house him, Mograine just looks even smaller in it, like he’s still growing into it. He’s not exactly scrawny, no, but he’s lean like someone who’s still growing into their body. He still looks so young, and it’s a sobering thought when she realizes that he is still young, too young when he was turned and still too young now. He was on the cusp of adulthood, then, and she wonders if he still is, now. Aging was something that was never really clear, as far as undeath went.

“I’ll go as well,” Jaina offers. “Lana’thel can come with us, too. I can keep an eye on her, and if anything goes wrong, Garrosh will know immediately.”

“Are you sure you can keep them in line?” he asks resignedly, eyeing the other three undead around her.

“I’ve already killed Lana’thel once, and Muradin twice,” Jaina states simply.

“Sounds like a plan,” Fordring allows, if a bit wearily. The Light wraps itself around his shoulders like a shawl, and he relaxes into its warm embrace, whether he realizes it or not. It reaches a curious tendril towards the death knight, inquisitive, and Mograine flinches.

\---

When they part ways temporarily, it’s done very grudgingly; neither Mograine nor Garrosh is happy with them being out of their immediate line of sight and are very open about it. Mograine doesn’t trust them as far as he could throw them and therefore expected the worst (understandably so), and Garrosh doesn’t like Jaina being away from both him and Thrall.

“It was stupid luck that we got out in the first place, and you want to risk everything for someone who doesn’t even want it?” he asks lowly, just short of muttering so that only she and Thrall can hear, looking in Lana’thel’s direction with a suspicious glance. Lana’thel is currently speaking with Sylvanas, quietly and sadly; the dark ranger switching between mournful and furious, and the Blood Queen doing the same.

“It’s the right thing to do,” Jaina replies, voice soft but will immovable. “No one else will help them right the wrongs done to them- why shouldn’t I?” He stares her down, trying to assert his dominance, but she will not be cowed.

It takes some convincing on her part and Thrall’s (though he, too, doesn’t look too pleased with the situation), but Garrosh eventually accepts what they need to do.

While they run through the red halls, every once in a while, there is a strange tug at the back of her head, as if she’s being pulled backwards or falling, and she knows that it’s Garrosh trying to reach out in turn, fumbling his hands over the knot tying their souls together. It’s every few minutes he checks, just making sure she’s still there, and the sensation becomes as steady as a pulse.

Watching Muradin zip through the San’layn, tearing through them as though they were made of paper, Jaina realizes that he was holding back when she fought him. She asks, barely heard over the cacophony of screams and clashing metal, and he replies:

“Yeah, I was going easy on yeh. The Lich King wanted y’ back in one piece, and I couldn’t exactly do that if I was actually trying,” said between the teeth of a crooked smile and easy laughter. “Y’ did pretty good yourself, though.” He almost looks himself again.

Lana’thel is no better, the high ceilings giving her plenty of room to fly overhead and drop fireballs on her fallen followers, though she does not cackle with glee as she did with Jaina, brows drawn together and mouth affixed onto her face as a dour line covering her teeth. Her fire is apparently much more effective than Jaina’s frost, and the San’layn light up like dry matchsticks under her wrath. However, her blizzards still prove to be useful in taking down the liches they encounter alongside the soldiers, Lana’thel’s ravenous fire and the ravenous infection clinging to Muradin’s blades finding no flesh to consume among their bones. Her frost is more than enough to splinter them into dust.

She’s not sure how long it actually takes them to reach the Blood Princes’ council chamber; everything is a hurried chaos, and she’s surprised that the four of them have managed to not injure each other accidentally, just with the fire and frost alone. She and Lana’thel keep clear of each other for the most part, and Sylvanas and Muradin are somehow quick enough to flit between the falling embers and shards of ice. Shrieks of pain fill the air, along with a thick, black smog coming from Lana’thel’s flames as they consume the flesh of the San’layn. What were once trained scourge soldiers are now a screaming mass of burning corpses, reduced to scrambling around the room in a panic. The Blood Queen gives them no quarter, and Jaina is abnormally calm in the bedlam. She doesn’t quite feel as if she’s there, detached from her own body but for the gentle pulling on the thread of her soul, constant as a heartbeat. She doesn’t feel much else, overcome at this show of terrible power. It feels too familiar, nauseatingly so, and she has to be careful not to think about it too hard, lest she pulled back into a vision of Stratholme.

(Something about fire being the bane of the fallen elves makes sense to you on a level you don’t quite remember; old superstitions and old truths mingling together, throwing salt over your shoulder and black cats crossing your path. All deep and ancient fears of even more ancient creatures lurking in the dark and just out of sight, all wives’ tales, but still their words remain. You think you’ve read about things like these in your mother’s storybooks, and you can’t help but wonder if stories are all that they are, when you, yourself are a creature that could have come out of one.)

Is this what remaining a queen would have meant- becoming a caliginous demigod at the cost of being caged? Had she not been freed, how much power would have been instilled into her? What sort of destruction would she have wrought under Ner’zhul’s hand- would her Stratholme have been Theramore instead? She can see it now, in the back of her mind; the harbor frozen over, allowing no escape, and a whirling blizzard overhead, covering everything with hail and ice. Pained and Aegwinn frozen where they stood, and freed only later when they have become frost creatures like herself, and spread her snowstorm through the rest of the marsh. It’s painfully vivid, this vision of an eternal winter settling over Dustwallow, of how easy it could be done. Could she be stopped? She doesn’t know, and the prospect of it is dizzying.

She’s dazed for so long that it takes her a moment to realize that they’re crossing under an archway into what must be the council hall. There’s crowds of San’layn here, to be sure, but Lana’thel ignores them in favor of flying over the mob and flapping in place above the raised platform where the Blood Princes stood. The San’layn are no longer linked to her, but they still part down the middle as she flies over them, allowing Jaina, Sylvanas, and Muradin to stride right on through. Their weapons are out and ready, but they seem hesitant to attack, and she’s not sure if it’s because Lana’thel was or still is their queen or if they witnessed her lighting all who attacked them on fire. The Blood Princes, however, have no such hesitation.

Their faces are sharp and angular, stretched past that of any mortal’s capacity, and their ears are large and bat-like, framing each side of their faces along with long, unkempt hair and the raised cowls that no doubt hide their teeth. Their eyes are all small and dark, beady and wet like that of a pig’s, and show no sign of sentience outside of their dreadful hunger. Jaina had heard that the Blood Princes had received some sort of power in compensation for their additional deaths, but she hadn’t any idea it would be this, turned to creatures of the sort she had only seen in her mother’s fairytales, something she saw flickers of in her periphery whenever she glanced at Lana’thel.

Most notably, the biggest change she hadn’t expected were the leathery wings sprouting from their backs like their queen’s, and the thin, glowing red strands tying the three of them together, seen only when she turns her head and isn’t looking directly at them or when she blinks and the fractions of seconds between her eyelids closing. The other San’layn seem to fear them more than her companions do, and she has to wonder if this power was a reward or a punishment.

“My queen,” croaks the middle one with drab, grey hair. His voice is less that and more a rumbling growl, barely comprehensible through its roughness and the clicking of his teeth under the cowl. It sets her own on edge, clenching her jaw to the point of pain, and the San’layn around them seem to share a similar sentiment; their fear is all too palpable, a herd of prey spotted by their predators and with no means to escape. “How kind of you to join us.” The Blood Queen lands with a gust of air rolling across the floor, landing on her feet lightly.

“It certainly is lovely to see you again, Valanar,” Lana’thel simpers, tongue sweet like poisoned honey and gaze gone cold with quiet rage. “Though I see you haven’t changed much.”

“Do you like them?” Valanar asks, tilting his head mischievously as he stretches out his wings. “I think our master’s gifts suit me better, don’t you think?” Lana’thel quakes with restrained fury, expression stretched and twisted into an alien-looking disdain for all of a moment before it returns to her smug sneer.

“You are still the same as you ever were,” Lana’thel replies with a curl of her lip. “Undeserved power never suited you, but that will never stop you from clamoring for it, I suppose.” Valanar freezes, his teeth clattering from him clicking them together angrily, and the one on the left with dark, coal-colored hair laughs, a deep, rasping cackle- Keleseth, she thinks.

“We don’t need you anymore, Lana’thel,” he chuckles. “We’re more powerful than you ever were.” Lana’thel takes a step forward, eyes hooded and looking every bit of a great cat stalking its quarry, rigid focus and fluid grace. The San’layn all flinch away when she moves, including the Blood Princes as well, to their disgrace. Lana’thel scoffs, and this is an insult too great for them, spurring them into attack.

Valanar dives at Lana’thel, a flurry of leather wings and needle-teeth, and Sylvanas and Muradin both attack the other two before they can aid their comrade. The San’layn hesitate, still, watching their former queen be assaulted by their current rulers, and in their moment of doubt, Jaina begins to conjure glaciers from her breath, blowing air through her palms and it coming out the side a winter squall. She guides the swirling frost around the room carefully, circling the council chamber until the San’layn are blocked off from them. Some tried to stop her, to be sure, but the thick, gleaming fog pouring from her throat gave them pause in the way that it gave Muradin pause: with hoarfrost creeping fast over their weapons and armor. They are quick to withdraw, scrambling away and scratching at the frost, trying to stop it in its relentless feeding. They were quicker to give up than Muradin, and already their fellows help them with their task of scraping the frost of off them; Jaina thinks they should be alright if they finish this quickly.

She finds that Sylvanas has already stuck both Keleseth and Taldaram (the third one and with hair a glinting, oily silver) with several of her black arrows, tearing the thin membrane of their wings and grounding them permanently. This seems to have spurred them into a mindless frenzy, limbs all stretched thin and spindly, too much like bats or spiders with how fast and wild they moved. Sylvanas can keep her distance but just barely, Keleseth giving her no quarter and certainly no time to either notch another arrow or draw her blade. She can’t tell if Muradin is having an easier time with Taldaram or not; he’s right in the fray, inches away from Taldaram’s abyss-maw of a mouth as he parries his claws and has his own strikes dodged. Jaina doesn’t understand- the black arrows should have stopped them in their tracks by now or at least slowed them, but there doesn’t seem to be any difference in when she started conjuring her glaciers and when she finished, other than their recklessness increasing twofold.

There’s even an arrow or two in Valanar, from what she can see of the tangle of grey-red shapes moving above their heads so quickly that they blurred, but it doesn’t seem to have altered his strength in any capacity. Lana’thel has taken on a terrifying shape, her limbs stretched too thin as well and spines growing out of her skin, down the middle of her back. Her eyes are too big, too watery, inky black pits vivid even in the blur of her speed. Her face has stretched so much that her bones show through the skin, gaunt and angular, and her jaw seems to have unhinged like a snake’s, teeth all canines and with a chunk of Valanar’s flesh clenched between them. Blood is splattered down her front, and Valanar’s as well, bleeding profusely from where the flesh between his shoulder and his neck once was. This does not slow him, even a little bit, coming after the Blood Queen with a screech, and Jaina realizes that the Blood Princes are going to keep coming after them, relentless as death itself even as her companions literally tear them to pieces.

She cannot hope to aid them with her frost without consuming them with it; they have no time to bring each of them back again, and Jaina’s not even sure that there would be enough left over for her to do so. Red flickers at the corners of eyes, and the loose threads that hang off of the Blood Princes as bloody tendrils draw her attention. Could she pull them apart? Could she? Could she?

Eyes half-lidded, vision murky but not dark, she does, wrapping her fingers around the tangles of bloody, sludge-dripping red and pulling. There is resistance here, the three of them still bound to Ner’zhul and each other, but she sinks her nails into the fibers of the thread. An odd chill runs from the tips of her fingers up her arm, and she does not know if Ner’zhul feels her presence or if she’s feeling his, fingers cold to the very bone. She finds that she doesn’t care, a vindictive spite flaring up from the blackened pit of her heart. She pulls once, and Keleseth stumbles. She pulls twice, and Taldaram falls. She pulls a third time, and Valanar twitches, slowing down the slightest bit. In the same instant, Lana’thel has his bared throat in her teeth, crunching it down between her jaws. She pulls, and pulls, and pulls until the thread finally snaps, recoiling from the three of them simultaneously and falling limply in her hands before disappearing.

The black arrows take their effect, finally, the hiss of something acidic and the smell of burning flesh filling the air as the dozen arrows sticking out of Keleseth all activate at once. He screams, and won’t stop screaming until he suddenly drops to the ground and curls up into a ball, stiffening into that position permanently as death takes him. Taldaram drops soon after, falling to his knees and Muradin lopping off his head with a slice of one of his runeblades. Finally, Valanar’s twitching body finally falls limp in Lana’thel’s jaws, the crack of his spine under her canines resonating through the room. She releases him, and as his body falls and crumples on the ground, the form she holds morphs back into being something seen strictly in her periphery, the face that inspires desire and fear taking the front once again. Bright red blood dripping off of her chin, lips blackened with it, she is still beautiful.

Jaina lowers her ice walls, the glaciers breaking apart and melting away, and the San’layn are still there. The few caught by her frost-mold seem to be holding up alright, looking shaken but alright for the most part. Lana’thel smiles at them, something small and real. There are bags under her eyes, there are lines around her mouth and nose, and her teeth are black with blood. The smile is real, and she is the most beautiful that Jaina has ever seen her.


	8. Chapter 8

It’s a large group that decide to go with them; more than Jaina expected at the very least. She had thought that all that had remained of the San’layn were the few that they had encountered in the council chamber after Lana’thel’s firestorms tearing through all that they came across, but no, there were still a couple pockets of them scattered throughout the red halls. The loss of their queen, and then their princes, had rattled their chains to the Lich King enough that they could choose to run and hide. By all means, they are still intimidated when they are found, Lana’thel still soaked with blood and her clothing torn and tattered, not the only one but by far the most noticeably so.

The ones that decide not to- out of fear or loyalty, she cannot tell- are purged with fire. Every single one of them.

“I will not allow my people to suffer any longer than they need to,” Lana’thel states, oddly, rigidly calm while her firestorms whirl around them and screams fill the air once more. “If we fail, then at least these ones will be safe from him.” Sylvanas nods sympathetically. The Lich King cannot keep their people caged if there is nothing to cage at all.

They start to trudge back to rejoin the rest of the army, to the plague wing where they had planned to go originally, and where they had apparently chased Muradin when they had first seen him. She recognizes the twisting halls as they make their way through, senseless but for the gentle, insistent tugging of white and gold cords, just behind her eyes and a faint trail starting from her throat and leading through walls, always towards the same point. She never really expected to get this far, in any capacity, and still half-expects them to fail now. Any minute now, any minute, something is going to happen, and they are going to fail. They’re going to regroup with the rest of the army, and then find that Putricide was too much for them. They’ll get there, and he’ll already have resurrected Mograine for a second time, and Fordring for the first, the veil of light clinging to him so tightly unable to free him from these unholy bonds. Garrosh will return to his mindlessness once more, and no more will the elements aid Thrall.

They get there, and Mograine is running Putricide through with his runeblade.

Putricide dies with a wheeze, falling as limp as a puppet with its strings cut, and slides off of the blade easily, a foul-smelling ooze coating the metal where he once was, pooling on the floor where he falls. Fordring’s face scrunches up a bit, but he’s doing a little better than Thrall or Varian who both are covering their mouths with their hands in hopes of mitigating the awful stench. Mograine doesn’t appear to care about the smell too much, already hastily wiping the ooze off of his runeblade. He fishes a faded cloth from a little pocket on his belt, and attempts to clean it the best he can, given the circumstances. Fordring says something to him, gesturing to the greatsword, but Jaina is too far away to hear exactly what. Mograine shakes his head, all the same, and Jaina manages to hear his last couple of words as the distance between them finally closes:

“…light would only damage it. But I appreciate the thought.”

“Just something to keep in mind,” Fordring offers companionably. He finally looks over to them, and sighs. “I see you’ve picked up some strays.” Mograine looks up then, too, and he’s exasperated, clearly, but resigned. Sylvanas bristles defensively, but before she can respond, Fordring says, looking over to Garrosh and Dranosh and the cluster of nascent death knights around them, “Well, the more the merrier, I suppose. We’ll need all the help we can get to take the throne.” His statement makes this a little bit more real for Jaina, still numb but for the steady pulse of the white and gold cords. It’s still seems a faraway thing, taking on her former master, let alone thinking of anything else afterwards, and her veins thrum with the choking heat of some unknown emotion, level-headed but eerily so, even as it prickles up the back of her neck and leaves her feeling wired with a frantic energy.

Without a mind to where she’s going, she begins to drift over to where the threads are being pulled, finds herself at Garrosh’s side, Thrall drifting over as well while the former and Dranosh speak to their newly acquired wards.

“You’re shaking,” Thrall notes with concern. She examines her hands, and they are indeed trembling.

“So I am,” she replies flatly. She’s not meaning to be rude, really, but it’s difficult to really mean anything when she’s just now becoming abruptly aware of how much of this energy is flooding through her body. She hadn’t thought she had the capacity to feel so much, still, but she apparently does. She decides that she doesn’t like it.

“Are you alright?” Thrall asks, hunching a little bit, trying to make himself smaller and less threatening. It takes her far longer than she really feels is necessary for her to reply.

“No,” she replies, barely a breath let alone a word, but Thrall hears her, somehow. There is something vile-tasting under her tongue, and she thinks there should be some feeling of fluid under it, too much as if her body is preparing to vomit, but there isn’t. There isn’t, and this is Wrong on levels she can’t quite explain. There are many things Wrong, and she doesn’t know what they are, all prompts of functions she doesn’t know that she can accomplish. Her body itself is a beacon of it, this wrongness; a half-working bag of skin and bones, all wrong and with no means to fix. Everything is too loud, too much, every noise a grating screech, every light a glare.

Thrall says, lowly, calmly, “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“I don’t know,” Jaina says. She thinks she says it. She doesn’t know for sure.

“Am I allowed to touch you?” Thrall asks. She nods, feeling like she’s going to vibrate out of her body. Slowly, keeping his hands in her line of sight, he cradles her jaw, and his hands are large enough that he can cover her ears in doing this, as well. The room is muffled by his fingers, and by his pulse, gently beating in his palms. The sound is something she falls into, holding onto each individual beat, and she might have gone deadweight, just a little bit, letting him hold her up while she tries to get a hold of herself. She’s not sure when this actually occurred, but her eyes are closed, light blacked out for the most part. Her world is subdued and muted, and slowly, the energy’s angry buzzing stops.

Thrall’s thread is earth-brown, soft and muted and radiating warmth. She cannot help but desire it, her own thread still grey with dust and ragged. The temptation to reach out and touch is almost too much, and this is what snaps her out of this strange, manic trance. It’s not an immediate thing, no, but it gives her something to focus on while she shakes loose from the clutches of this, this wasps’ nest in her chest. She blearily looks up at Thrall, who is still doing his best to remain calm. She cannot allow herself to drag him down with her, however lonely for him, for his living soul, she might be.

“Are you alright?” he asks, muffled from his hands still cupping the sides of her head.

“Yes,” she replies, her voice magnified inside her own head.

“Alright,” he sighs, placated. “You were gone for a while, there; I was getting worried,” he jokes a little weakly, drawing back his hands. There is a fine coating of frost on his fingertips, small and delicate snowflakes that melt away quickly, his hands wet from it.

Garrosh has finished addressing his and Dranosh’s following, apparently, because his attention is now fully on them. He also seems to have been waiting impatiently for Jaina to return back to herself, doing what can only be described as pouting until Thrall’s hands withdraw completely. She’s not sure if it’s directed at Thrall or herself; perhaps both. Garrosh has always been a covetous creature, and never subtle, especially now that he has something to lose.

She takes each of their hands in hers, her own so small and cold in theirs. Thrall shivers but still holds hers in turn, and Garrosh’s grip is tight as a vice. She says, “We’ll get through this,” chants it like a curse, sees gold-white-brown when she blinks. Garrosh nods. Thrall nods.

“We’ll get through this,” she says again, like saying it enough will make it true.

\---

They climb the spire.

It starts with them climbing a long, winding staircase, leading from an innocuous-looking door just behind Putricide’s main laboratory. Their group is small but efficient; the top of the spire is dangerous, and they must only take what they need. Fordring goes, obviously, for he bears the Ashbringer, but Mograine stays behind. If Fordring falls, one of them must remain to lead the Ashen Verdict. Both Thrall and Varian stay behind as well, and neither of them looks particularly pleased with this, Varian on edge and agitated with worry and Thrall incredibly afraid for them, openly so. Sylvanas goes and Garrosh goes, their red eyes alight with fury, and the Saurfangs stay behind with Lana’thel and Muradin, guarding their kin. Jaina goes. Nobody questions this.

They pass by the bodies of fallen scourge and crusaders alike on their way to it, and Jaina cannot help but wonder what the cost was of securing this passage while she was away. She does not lead them, not in any capacity, though she does stand close to the front, behind Fordring. The Argent Crusade, Ebon Blade, Horde, and Alliance all intermingle now as they refurbish the lab into a more defensible position, as if they had all agreed to this pact of light and ash, and not just the former. She supposes it doesn’t matter now, and that they think this, too; these borders will mean nothing if they fail.

She does notice, however, that the Ebon Blade, and indeed the undead of any of these factions, congregate near the front, towards the entrance of the lab. Lana’thel and the San’layn are on one side, and Dranosh and the stray knights on the other, lining the outside of the army and keeping the living in. Perhaps she is not the only one who is desirous of the living souls.

They take a small group of forces with them, as well; a few paladins and death knights, among others she recognizes: the scowling troll priest from before with her ragged, purple shawl, a towering undead troll with his wild, azure hair in long braids, the worried-looking orc woman with her shining armor, the gnome with cotton candy pink hair and fire in her clenched fists, and the human death knight acolyte, with curly hair and a lean frame, who still looks to her with tired but unwavering hope. She’s not sure still if she deserves it, but she will do the best she can to live up to such open admiration.

It’s a hard climb, Ner’zhul sending waves of undead to slow them, but they still take each step, however slow and stubborn the going may be. She expected nothing less than this; everything with her former master is a war, whether that be them clinging to these icy steps as val’kyr try to fling them off, or him clinging to the armor that houses him, if only to spite the ones that put him there. He has been fighting his whole life for what he wanted and he hoped to keep, and this is no different.

There is something off about that, Jaina notes, as the memories of her former master continue to whirl around in her head. She’s only gotten fragments, murky images and muffled sounds, and while that’s certainly enough for her to get the gist of what had happened, there is something in his earlier memories that she doesn’t understand. There is an image that he kept coming back to, again and again and again, of an orc woman, with long, wild, auburn hair and bright eyes, her gaze searing through him with all the radiance of the sun, and while this image is vivid, the most vivid of her master’s memories that she’s seen, the most treasured by far, there is still something off about it.

While with other memories, however fragmented they were, Jaina still had gotten the flash of a name, a sound, with this one, there is nothing. No letters, no sounds; nothing. Nothing, save for the god-like reverence he held for this woman, so wretched with love for her was he, and the remorse that accompanied it, marrow-deep in his bones. The only conclusion that Jaina can draw is that she betrayed him in some way, watching as over time she went from a years-long silence to a seemingly worried fervor to an abrupt and terrible rage, like she is his god and he has not been faithful, but Jaina can’t quite be sure. Through all that, through Ner’zhul following through with all of her wishes only to have her spurn him, he still blames himself.

Shortly after that, this is when these old and malevolent beings begin to appear, forcing on him the powers of a god, and she has the odd realization that these creatures stole the woman’s face. They stole her face and used it as their own, made Ner’zhul disloyal without him knowing, and Jaina has to wonder, did they steal her name as well, or did Ner’zhul seal it away from himself as punishment?

It’s a miracle that they somehow don’t lose anyone on the way to the top, but perhaps with how little a group they are, it just makes it that much easier to guard. Jaina merely takes the front when the steps reach the open air and begins to conjure storms to protect them. She finds that restraint is an easy thing to let go of when the safety of those around her is compromised. Outside, and with no allies within range, she is free to unleash the power instilled in her, so she does. From her icy fingers spring tempests, streaking up the stairs and firing sharpened hail stones in all directions. It tears the bare-fleshed scourge to pieces, ghouls and vorgul and the like, and the armored scourge, death knights and vrykul, are slowed by this onslaught, the unlucky thrown over the edge of the stairs.

Jaina by no means gets all of them, a fair amount of the armored ones standing their ground, and gargoyles and val’kyr trying to pick them off, but she gets all that she can. Besides, she can trust Garrosh and Sylvanas to cover the ones she misses as they escort Fordring and the others. This is not an easy venture by any means, the howl of wind loud in her ears and her hands trembling anxiously even as the hoarfrost bursts forth from her palms, but it is a small comfort, knowing that there is no doubt in the fact that she can rely on them. This might not have been something that she wanted, this near-divine endowment, but she will make it something that is hers, all the same.

There’s an eerie moment of quiet before they reach the top, the waves of undead trickling off as they near it. It’s not silent, not completely, the shrieking winds of such a high place always present, and her own adding to the cacophony, but there is a moment where this is the only sound, the rattling of bones and armor no longer present. She doubts that Ner’zhul has run out, but perhaps he cannot bear to waste anymore of his followers, even if he can just put them back together. Jaina has made a chokehold of this path, and she doubts that he would want to sacrifice any more to the ravenous maw of her squall. It does not dissipate completely as they near the last step, but she cannot allow it to continue at this height of strength with them now reaching a limited space, bidding it to shrink until it’s just a pale, shimmering fog gleaming overhead. She wears it like armor, it surrounding her body as thick as plate and housing her as it was meant to. The last few steps are a truly laborious trudge, time slowing to a crawl as one foot after the other, she finally reaches the top.

The king sits on his throne. Surrounded by his kin, he sits on his throne, exalted.

The king sits on his throne, and overhead, in chains and dangling from the saronite pillars on either side of the sovereignty, is Bolvar Fordragon, blackened with soot and neither alive or dead or undead, something completely outside it, something lost in between, his entire existence a screeching wrongness grating at her.

The king sits on his throne, and Jaina is not dreaming, but she feels like she should be, all the world a blue haze of numbness save for the pounding of her deadened heart. The king, that thing sitting on the throne, is not Arthas, but it wears his face like an ill-fitting mask, worn down and warped by frost and cold, a doppelganger caught and unable to keep up its ruse. It is not Arthas, it is no longer Arthas, and the body has aged. The body survived, and Arthas did not. This is what she tells herself, this is what she knows to be true, but when it opens its mouth, she still expects his voice with a flinch. Ner’zhul’s voice is what comes out, low as an abyss and gravelly, and this just makes her flinch more.

“Frostwitch,” he starts, the words leaving his mouth like it’s a threat of things to come, mist seeping between his teeth. “You’ve returned.” She hates this, this fear that has been branded onto her at the mere sound of his voice. She does not flinch, makes herself not flinch, keeping her hands in tight fists and eyes wide open.

“So I have,” she replies, passively biting and spiteful. She does not blink, she does not back down from his gaze. The things she sees in the corners of her eyes or when her eyes are closed are starting to overlap with what she’s seeing now, Frostmourne bright as a fallen star from the tangled mass of shimmering threads hanging from it. They’re spread in all directions; under their feet and dangling off the edge of the spire they stand upon, phasing straight through solid objects and the ground as the connections are pulled taut in the sword’s hunger. Her own link to Garrosh is glaring, leaving discolored spots in her eyes as the little army files in behind her. Garrosh takes to her side, his remaining axe clenched in his fist, and as he growls, the cords only glow brighter, color distorting her vision.

“You’ve returned to me,” Ner’zhul says, the words coming from Arthas’ mouth and with Arthas’ crooked smile, and he knows, he knows he’s doing it with how she very nearly quails away from this, these words and Arthas’ grin and Arthas’ face.

“ _No_ ,” she hisses angrily, eyes adamantly open. “I did _not_ return to you; I will _never_ return to you. I am _not_ yours, I am not and _never will be_.” The smile doesn’t wilt, exactly, but it morphs into something sneering, and Jaina realizes distantly that this actually hurt him, the comprehension of this dawning on her with a restless fear, a jolting exhilaration.

“So be it,” he states with a note of finality. “If you will not return willingly, I will drag you back by the ties that bind you.”

The king rises from his throne, Frostmourne in hand. The sword gleams with a sentient hunger, and as he raises it to the sky, calling winter down upon them, his army of the damned rush forward to meet them.

With a howl, Garrosh charges forth, his own battle cry stirring the hearts of the others to do the same. He is pulling the scourge soldiers to himself several at a time, his shade-hands sinking claws into the necks of his quarry and dragging them to his awaiting fury. Sylvanas shrieks, a preternatural screech that vibrates every sinew in her body, and shrieks and shrieks as she fires arrow after arrow at the val’kyr who attempt to throw them from the ledge. Leaving them to handle the Lich King’s forces, Jaina runs headlong into the fast-spreading blizzard, Fordring right behind her and wings of light bursting forth from his back. He doesn’t seem to see them, but it is the brightest thing she’s ever seen, vision blinded any time she turns her head. Perhaps he doesn’t need to, his faith a beacon by itself.

The winds blow hard against her as she enters, very nearly blinding her and threatening to topple her as the air around them thickens with ice and snow. Despite this, she notes that her own clouds are not blown away by these winds, clinging to her stubbornly as they fight to keep their form, sections of it even seeming to absorb some of the squall into itself. The understanding of what this means is sudden as a lightning strike, and Jaina thinks, _maybe_ , a frantic sort of hope taking hold of her, nerves jittery as she reaches her hands deliberately into the swirling clouds and attempts to draw the blizzard into herself. It pools in her palms, and steadily, the storm clouds she’s conjured thicken, shielding them from the fury of her former master.

As they move further into the vortex, every step a battle hard-won, the mists grow no thinner, and she cannot see the Lich King, cannot hear him over the wailing of the storm. He can’t have gone far, but it’s impossible to tell how much distance they’ve actually travelled through the whipping gusts of the storm, which continues to build across the platform. They must deal with this quickly, or this storm will be their end. Her clouds continue absorb his and grow larger, electricity rippling through them, and if she is a vessel, if this is what she was made to be, then she will bottle this up, hold it in herself until the glass breaks. She opens her mouth and inhales, the fog sliding down her throat as if being sucked into a whirlpool.

They reach the eye of the storm.

Emerging from the clouds, Ner’zhul gives them no quarter, very nearly slashing through them both with a swing of Frostmourne. Fordring is behind her still, and she barely manages to drag the both of them away, mouth still a gaping void as she continues to pull the wind and frost into her body. Touching the paladin’s holy armor burns her hand, her fingers smoking and black when she pulls them back, but this does not stop her from jerking them away from the Lich King. Rime coats the protruding bones, and she tries to ignore the dull throb of heat that remains beneath it.

There isn’t any sort of sense of stillness, but there is something intimate in being secluded, the three of them, a king, a queen, and a knight, in the eye of an all-consuming blizzard. The Lich King moves lethargically, Jaina able to be well out of the way before his strikes can land. His usual chest plate seems to be missing, in its place a simpler saronite plate with runes painted onto the surface, and the skull-buckle belt nowhere to be seen. The helm itself isn’t smaller, but it seems to be missing pieces, looking more of a warped, thorny crown than a helmet. Arthas’ face- Ner’zhul’s face is scrunched up, brows lowered and eyes narrowed, lines deeply set around his mouth as he grimaces. There is something intimate in witnessing the turmoil clear on his face, as if beholding something forbidden, peeking through key holes and through the cracks of doors. Perhaps it is because Jaina wears half the armor now. Perhaps it is because he is weaker than he let on.

Either way, this lethargy doesn’t impede him from blocking Fordring’s attacks, the air around them crackling whenever their blades collide. Jaina swears, she can feel Frostmourne recoiling, can hear it hissing in pain, can feel its ravenous pull on her even through its master’s struggle. It is everything that Fordring can just to keep his strikes from hitting; he may be lethargic, but should even one strike manage to touch flesh that will be all that he needs to rip the soul from his body. Jaina can do little beyond taking the blizzard into herself, the cold pulsing through veins she didn’t realize she still had. The absorbing of this power is unending she finds, and she thinks that this is not going to stop until she has swallowed the storm whole. She fears that if she stops, it will unleash itself all at once, ripping out of her and leaving her in scorched tatters.

After an agonizing eternity of watching the clash of Ashbringer and Frostmourne, the storm finally begins to clear. Everything is brighter and more vivid, her fingers twitching as sparks of electricity flit between them. Too clearly does she see the tangled mass of souls, threads everywhere and vision altered with morphing masses of flickering color. Her head feels too full, her heart is beating too fast, both energized beyond capacity with this voltage, and wind and fog still yet remain. She does not close her eyes. She does not close her mouth. She’s not sure if she can, but given the choice, she’s pretty sure she wouldn’t, regardless.

The gusts of wind whipping around them begin to slow enough that she can hear the battle beyond and Garrosh’s roaring echoing across the platform, a battle hymn for all who hear it. Their forces have cut down the Lich King’s significantly, enough so that when the clouds clear, Sylvanas apparently feels confident enough in their ability to join her and Fordring, or is too fixated with her revenge to care. Garrosh will stay and help them; they should be alright. Into a guard dog he was made, and thus a guard dog shall he be. Sylvanas treads near the edge of the storm, notching an arrow on her bow while Jaina relentlessly devours its remains. The Lich King does not attempt to stop her, or even to try and maintain it; it’s all that he can just to fight Fordring, just to keep the holy sword from breaking through the armor. Thus, he does not see when Sylvanas lets loose a single black arrow, and the slick, black metal point pierces the tendons of his neck.

“I’ve been saving these for you for a long time, Arthas,” Sylvanas spits, already notching another one. The push back is enough to make him stumble, but he does not falter past that and recovers before Fordring can make use of this moment of weakness. Sylvanas fires another one, and this gives no more a push back than the first. He doesn’t fall, and doesn’t appear to really notice Sylvanas, too engrossed with Fordring to notice. She fires a third, hissing angrily, and this, the force of the hit from this one, is the thing that makes him fall to his knees. He slips on his feet, stumbles and falls some distance away from them, hands clenched tightly around the handle of Frostmourne as he uses the sword to keep himself propped up. This, coupled with Fordring and Sylvanas closing in, with Jaina finally consuming the last of the blizzard, seems to bring some sort of ancient weariness out of him. He sags onto the sword, pushing himself up almost drunkenly.

It’s not as if the arrows aren’t working- Jaina can hear the sizzle of acid as it burns through his flesh- but it doesn’t stop him. It doesn’t kill him. He takes a swing at Fordring, the strike dodged easily, and is struck back by a blow from Ashbringer, the light of the sword cracking the saronite plate and leaving burns on what skin is exposed to open air. It doesn’t kill him.

“ _Why won’t you die, fiend?!_ ” Sylvanas screams furiously. A fourth arrow is notched, fired, and it pierces the back of his head. He lurches forward, very nearly falls, but rights himself last-minute. Finally, he turns, he looks at Sylvanas, not with anger, but with a dire sort of desperation that sets Jaina’s teeth on edge.

“Enough,” he says, barely above a mutter, and not a second passes before there are shadowy claws wrapped around the Banshee Queen’s throat, around Fordring’s. The shades lift them up, flinging them into the pillars on either side of the throne and Ashbringer falling from Fordring’s hands, clattering as is slides across the platform. He turns his attention back to Jaina, and it’s barely a fraction of a second before she, too, has her throat clenched between these hands. She doesn’t fear for her breath, but the instinct to struggle is too strong to ignore, trying to rip these fingers away from her as he slowly trudges over to her, the tip of his blade dragging across the ground with a grating screech. He still sways a bit drunkenly, the use of this magic no doubt draining what little energy he has left.

“You left,” he starts, spits it like a curse. “Why. Why did you leave?” Jaina does not respond, lightning building behind her teeth. “You could have been so much.” She stares down at him, says nothing as she forces herself not to struggle. “You could have done so much.” She stares down at him. “Why did you leave?” She says nothing. She does not struggle.

“ _Answer me, Frostwitch_ ,” he snarls, eyes flaring angrily before dwindling back to a dim glow. Still, she says nothing, her whole body just short of trembling with the power jolting through her bones. She waits.

“No matter,” he sneers. “You will return to me now. This will be made right,” he continues, half-mumbling as if comforting himself, and Jaina wonders if Arthas was truly gone, for all his apparent influence on Ner’zhul. He raises his sword. Frostmourne pierces straight through the chainmail in the opening between the chest plate and the belt, her death-wound reopening, but her blood does not run down his blade. Already, she feels the pull of Frostmourne on her soul as it viciously tugs and tugs and tugs. Gold and white flash behind her eyes. She does not give. The flesh on his neck starts to burn away.

“You will return to me, and so will the Dreadnaught and the Banshee Queen,” he tells her, very nearly reverent with his affection. “You will all return to me, and the Burning Legion will _nothing_ compared to our might.”

She tells him, “I am not yours,” and the storm bursts out of her wound.

Immediately, lightning streaks down the blade, jolting the blade out of his hands as he is blasted away. The hands evaporate from her neck and she drops, but Frostmourne stubbornly sticks, even as hail, wind, and fog continue to rip out of the cavity it has created. Looking down at the blade is very nearly too much, excruciatingly aware of it lodged between her ribs. The image of this is clear, everything seeming blurry and she unable to focus on anything else. Out of its bearer’s hands, its hunger now seems muted, subdued as if sleeping. Gasping raggedly, her hands wrap around the handle of the blade and pull. The blade doesn’t budge for a few seconds before giving all at once, falling out of her surprised hands to the ground with a clatter.

Clouds continue to manifest from the chasm it left, the wound lit from a bright, white glare within. Sylvanas and Fordring are still down, the former stirring and the latter laying unmoving. The Lich King lay not too far away, the crown inches away from an outreached hand. He, too, lies still and unmoving. Teeth still chattering, she swallows down this power once more, bidding the wound to freeze over. It does, ice crackling under the broken chain links. Slowly, she approaches his fallen body, frost spells clenched in her fists, and his limbs do not move, still, remaining splayed out save for his one hand, reaching eternally for the crown just out of his grasp. Half of his head has been reduced to bone, Sylvanas’ arrows doing their work to their fullest, and Jaina can still hear the hiss of acid as it continues to eat away at it.

She kicks the crown away, and it tumbles towards the throne. She starts undoing the straps of her pauldrons, and tosses them away as well. She undoes the belt, the decorative teeth of the buckle glinting up at her. It joins the pile. She undoes the straps of the chest plate, it coming off in pieces, and throws them into the pile. She pulls off the chainmail, the ice of her death wound glowing a faint blue.

“Jaina,” Garrosh rumbles. She turns, and there Garrosh stands, a few feet behind her, the scourge soldiers finally downed, bones and debris everywhere. The little army stands ready behind him, worn but no worse for wear. He waits for her response.

“Help them,” she croaks, motioning vaguely to Sylvanas and Fordring. “Get Mograine.” Garrosh grunts an affirmation, then jerks his head towards them. The two trolls rush to Sylvanas’ side, and several paladins both to her and Fordring. The death knight acolyte almost flies down the stairs with how fast they run.

Jaina drags her feet back over to the Lich King’s fallen body. She starts tearing at his gauntlets, pulling them until they finally slip off his hands.

“Jaina,” Garrosh says again, reaching towards her. She shakes her head.

“No,” she mumbles as she fights with the shin guards. “I have to be the one to do it.” She throws them into the jumble of armor at the foot of the throne. That should be it.

Frostmourne still lays where it fell, now innocuous with its hunger subdued. She takes it into her hands, color distorting her sight. The blade is heavy, and the web of souls is quiet. Hushed.

She drags it over to the armor, and strains to lift it over her head. It comes down like a guillotine, the armor cracking apart the second the blade touches it. The crown shatters. Cold washes over her, prickling up the back of her neck, and she can sense Ner’zhul in her mind before he talks, seeping in fluidly to the forefront of her mind. His soul clings to the blade, the black, soot-covered strand fluttering weakly with nothing else tying it down. Exhaustion radiates from the corner in her head he’s borrowed.

_Frostwitch_ , he says, barely even a whisper. There is no malice in it. It’s a greeting, if a very tired one. He’s weak and fading.

_That is not my name, Ner’zhul_ , she corrects, not unkindly. A very faint fondness ripples from him. He goes quiet, and she lets him rest. She clutches the thinning, black thread in her fist, wrapped around the handle of Frostmourne. The font of souls is present, but she does not lose herself.

With no scourge forces stopping them, Mograine and the acolyte return in record time. Seeing Fordring felled, he immediately darts over to him, kneeling down next to him.

“I’m alright,” Fordring wheezes good-naturedly.

“Most of your ribs are broken and you have internal bleeding,” one of the paladins scolds despairingly.

“I’m just winded,” he chuckles, coughing. There’s a fair amount of blood in it, and Mograine looks caught somewhere between thoroughly exasperated and experiencing cardiac arrest. “I’ll be alright once the healers get here.”

“We need to destroy Frostmourne,” Jaina says.

“I’d love to help, but I doubt that I can even get up,” Fordring apologizes. Ashbringer is placed carefully away from him, no doubt to make room for the paladins examining him, who in turn shush him for speaking when he should be resting. Fordring looks to Mograine expectantly, and the death knight fidgets, unsure of himself.

“The blade will burn me,” he argues feebly.

“I know you can do it, Darion,” Fordring rasps fondly. “You are worthy.” The paladins shush him again. Mograine looks as though he was punched in the gut, all surprised weakness, but he steels himself. Jaina balances Frostmourne with the flat side of the blade carefully held up by her palms, her fingers tangled in the multitude of threads.

As Mograine takes the Ashbringer in his hands, squinting hard at the light pouring from it (everyone can see it, she knows, everyone covering their eyes or flinching), Ner’zhul’s final thoughts are this:

An orc woman, taller than him but just barely, with bright, wild hair and eyes even brighter, glowing like fallen stars. Their hands are clasped together as they walk down a simple, dirt path. She is smiling, something shy and private and for him.

_If we had had a child before she died_ , he whispers, like he’s telling her a secret. _They would’ve been like you, I think_. Jaina is speechless. Ashbringer is raised over them, ready.

_I am very tired_ , he continues. _It is time that I rest._ A very odd warmth is prickling behind her eyes, but they do not grow watery. They cannot.

He tells her, warmly, _thank you_ , and the Ashbringer is swung over Mograine’s head, snapping it in half. The cords are cut. All of them. The Light is a notoriously quick thief; all at once, they slip from her fingers, being ferried out of her hands and leaving her with nothing but the broken pieces of Frostmourne, the blade’s hunger finally sated in its destruction.

_He’s gone_ , she thinks, relief and uneasiness mixing at once. She did it. He’s gone.

She thinks, _what now?_

The question is a heavy weight.

\---

The next several days are spent clearing out the rest of the citadel.

The very first thing they do is figure out how to help Bolvar Fordragon down without hurting him, and then trying to figure out what the hell he is anymore. He doesn’t know, and neither does anyone else. However, despite his transformative state- eyes turned fiery, skin charcoal black and calloused, cracks running up his bare arms and chest and glowing like something burns within and is trying to get out- he’s somehow managed to keep his soul intact.

“Something about the lifebinder’s fire changed it,” he tells them, soft and wispy as smoke. “It burned too hotly for the Lich King to touch for too long.” Jaina can scarcely look at him without the searing brightness of it blinding her. She thought perhaps when Ner’zhul fell, this power would go with him. It has not. Just as a fire has made a home of Fordragon’s heart, so has a storm made hers one. She still sees whether she wants to or not, frost and lightning still crackles in her throat, but it’s not as overwhelming as it once was. But with Fordragon’s soul intact, they longer need Death Whisper’s phylactery, and rather than destroying it, smashing it on the ground like Sylvanas desires, Jaina asks that Fordring purify it instead.

“She doesn’t deserve to fade away into nothing,” she mumbles, and the old paladin nods, understanding. When Jaina holds the bottle in her hands, waiting for Fordring to be ready, there is a faint and tired _Traitor_ , uttered into her ear, accompanied with a grudging sense of being impressed. That’s probably the best response she could get, Deathwhisper stubborn until the end. Fordring takes the bottle gently, blowing a puff of air into its open mouth, and a tendril of light slides in like silk, evaporating the murky liquid and floating out the top and away. Sylvanas still smashes the bottle. It’s a fair compromise, Jaina thinks.

The citadel clearly is too big for them to have gotten everything on the first go- that was the point of such a swift and direct strike, they couldn’t hope to win if they attempted to take on all of the Lich King’s forces- so, once a safe route is established from their set up in the ruins of the foyer to the steps leading up to the throne, they quickly get to work weeding out the last of the scourge forces. The undead here have descended into chaos, now that they have no one to lead them. The mindless ones all dropped dead once their link to the sword was cut, and thankfully that takes out a large portion that they would’ve had to deal with. The majority of time spent is mostly gathering up the corpses, the Lich King’s, their own, whatever ones they found, and setting up massive funeral pyres.

She remembers finding this sort of morbid previous to this campaign, humans burying their dead in the ground where no one can see them rot, but over time, the disgust she felt towards burning them is only dampened by the ruthless efficiency everyone had to adopt in order to get through Northrend unscathed. Humans, dwarves, and gnomes all bury their dead, honor them in fields and tombs and mountain halls, but orcs burn theirs, and so do the Forsaken.

“Orcs have always burned their dead,” Garrosh says. “We honor them, by returning their bodies to the elements, and then we remember them by making little shrines.”

Sylvanas tells her, “No one has permission to make your will theirs,” grimacing bitterly. There is a thin, jagged line trailing up her stomach, the scar tissue dark. It matches Jaina’s, and Jaina takes a minute to seethe on her behalf. The anger is liberating.

They pick up a few more strays while they’re here- another pocket of cultists is found, along with multiple Vrykul, wandering around confused because they suddenly no longer hear the voice of their god. The cultists rejoin their captured kin, and the Ebon Blade offers for the Vrykul to join. A surprising amount of them do, though Jaina supposes it’s not that surprising if they have nowhere else to go, and the Ebon Blade is nothing if not safe harbor for the lost.

The Ashen Verdict will probably be cleaning up the citadel for months, Fordring estimates. There’s too much for them to go too quickly lest they miss something, and both he and Mograine hope to convert it into a fortress for the Ashen Verdict. It’s too defensible a structure for them to let it go to waste. They hope to go after the last remaining hold-outs of the cult of the damned, as well, but the citadel alone will take months to take care of. She supposes that this was never going to be easy, in any case.

The throne becomes a shrine of sorts for the fallen, for their own and everyone else lost to this, and in the coming days, already pilgrims come to pay their respects, bringing food and supplies for the exhausted troops. Fordring and Mograine don’t encourage this, exactly, but they certainly don’t stop them either, and somehow, a guard rail pops up along the outside path to the throne overnight. It’s merely wooden posts and rope fences, but it’s already a far cry safer than the previous safety precaution, which was all of nothing. Soon, torches are put along the path as well, and messages carved into the pillars on either side of the throne. Names, mostly, and dates, well-wishes and I’m-sorry’s and I-forgive-you’s. Goldclover has become the customary offering, growing far more commonly as the land heals, and has come to mean good luck. Jaina carves Ner’zhul’s name into the throne itself, the orcish runes somehow familiar, and writes nothing else. His name is there. His name will be remembered.

After a few weeks, Horde and Alliance forces begin to clear out, packing up to go home. Several people approach her on this matter, all at different times:

Varian leaves first. He is loath to be away from his son and his city for too long, with how long he was gone before. He brings her aside minutes before his departure, as awkward and nervous as he was before, but the limited window of time pressing him to be straight-forward.

He tells her, “No matter what happens, you are always welcome in the Alliance,” hands grasped around hers and far too close to her face. There is nothing inherently romantic in this, she thinks; Varian as long as she’s known him since rediscovering him, is still relearning what the boundaries of personal space are, and has always been tactile. “And if anyone says you’re not, they’ll answer to me,” he rumbles a bit threateningly, squeezing her hands tight like he means it.

“I appreciate the thought,” she replies quietly. She doesn’t quite believe him. He presses his forehead to hers, a surprisingly orcish show of familial affection, then hurries off to his escort before they drag him away. Fordragon and Muradin go with him, the dwarf cracking a crooked grin at her as he waves.

\---

Thrall is next to leave, a few days after Varian’s departure, and he takes Garrosh and the two Saurfangs with him. His people, too, do not like the extended leave of their Warchief, and already clamor to leave the accursed continent of Northrend. Orcs and trolls despise the cold, she has come to learn; they will endure it, yes, but not without copious complaint.

He talks to her the night before, a rare moment of rest in their work of cleaning up the citadel. It’s good work, it’s honest work, and it’s something Jaina can use to get her mind off of things without fear of losing it. She and Thrall talk, though it’s mostly on his part. Jaina doesn’t talk as much as she did before. He doesn’t seem to mind.

“Garrosh and Dranosh founded a clan for the fallen horde undead,” Thrall tells her. He laughs. “Well, some undead orcs and trolls starting following them around and declared them their leaders, anyway. The Rotaxe, they call themselves.”

“Hmm,” Jaina replies thoughtfully. It would explain why the stray death knights continue to gather around them like ducklings. “Are you alright with this?”

“Of course,” Thrall replies. “They’re still Horde, through and through.” He then tells her, quietly, “I wouldn’t turn them way regardless, but there is some solidarity between the Forsaken and the other Horde peoples now, because of them. They accept all comers. It will make things easier, in spite of their suffering.” He mourns them openly, face falling and looking down at their feet for a few moments, unable to bear looking at her.

“I’ve made contact with the Earthen Ring,” he says after a moment. “And I’ve asked Malfurion to contact the Circle.” She looks at him curiously.

“I’ve talked it over with Tirion and Darion, and,” he pauses, clearly nervous. “We’re going to try to cure undeath.” She stares at him.

“How?”

“Bolvar Fordragon is a special case, but we think if we start with him, we might be able to come up with something for everyone else. And since the Lich King is gone, there isn’t any sort of lingering barriers blocking us from trying.” Jaina doesn’t say anything; she cannot speak.

“We don’t know for sure,” Thrall continues, nervous again now that Jaina continues to be silent. “But we’re going to try. It might take months, even years, but we’re going to try.” Jaina still cannot say a word. The sort of hope this knowledge provides is daunting, like if she lets herself believe it, it’s just going to fly out of her hands.

“If we end up making any headway, you’ll hear about it,” Thrall tells her. She weaves her fingers in between his, shaking, and she can feel his pulse jump in his hand at the touch. His very skin radiates heat, and Jaina isn’t sure how he can stand to hold her frostbitten hands. He does, though, all the same. They remain that way for a while after.

“Where are you going to go after this?” he asks quietly.

“I don’t know,” she replies, unable to look at him. He thinks for a moment.

“If it comes down to it, you’re always a welcome friend of Orgrimmar,” he offers. It’s meant to be casual, a friend offering a friend safe haven, but his eyes are lit up with something and too full, and she can feel his pulse continue to thunder away in his palm.

“I’ll think about it,” she says after a moment. “Thank you.” He succeeds in hiding his hurt for the most part, but Jaina knows him too well for him to hide it effectively.

Their goodbyes are a short affair, Thrall very nearly crushing her with his embrace, like he’s afraid let go, and Garrosh crushing the both of them to his chest. Dranosh laughs, taunting Garrosh like they’re still children, and Garrosh lets go if only to pick a fight with him. Saurfang covers his face with his palm. Jaina watches them fly away on the Orgrim’s Hammer, feels her chest clench as Garrosh grips their souls knotted together like a vice. Even when they’re out of sight, she can feel it, though softer now, like a pulse.

\---

A week or so later, Sylvanas approaches her, a few days before she and Lana’thel leave with the remaining San’layn.

“The Forsaken will remember your service to us in our time of need,” Sylvanas says, assertive and slightly too formal for her to be comfortable. “Have you considered where you will go after this?”

“Not really,” Jaina replies, shrugging. Sylvanas nods.

“Well… Should your own people elect not to take you back into the fold, I am prepared to offer you a place among my advisors,” Sylvanas offers a bit stiffly. Her sincerity is no less real; she just seems embarrassed.

“Thank you,” Jaina replies genuinely. Sylvanas eyes her a little oddly, as if expected to be bitten.

When she and Lana’thel leave, she gives Jaina a curt nod in goodbye. Jaina responds in kind.

\---

The last person that comes to see her, and honestly the last person she expected to see, is Lorena.

It’s after a long day of refurbishing Lady Deathwhisper’s oratory into a commons area, and Jaina had just walked into the foyer, though she can’t even remember why upon seeing her former lieutenant standing there, speaking with Fordring with an escort of guards bearing Theramore’s seal.

“My Lady,” she starts, eyes wide with shock.

“Lieutenant,” Jaina greets a little breathlessly.

“It’s… admiral, now, actually,” she corrects, smiling weakly. “When we heard you had died, I was put in charge. But that doesn’t matter right now- I’ve come to take you home.” And irrationally, irrationally, Jaina doesn’t want to go, but she can’t think of any logical reason to deny her. So, she goes. With nothing but the clothes on her back, runed black robes and a dark purple coat with patched up sleeves, she goes.

\---

The boat ride home is strange.

It’s a long couple weeks across the sea. She hardly remembers any of it, lost in an unsure, anxious haze. The smell of salt is pungent now that she hasn’t been around it in months. She had expected this to be a comfort, but it’s not, the scent of it too strong and foreign. Her people still are loyal to her, somehow, even after months of her absence and her subsequent death. They regard her respectfully, but sadly, apologies constantly on the tips of their tongues. Each one is a little pick at her, a constant little stream of pick-pick-picks, and for the most part of the voyage, she is awash with guilt, however misplaced. They keep deferring to her instead of Lorena by mistake, and she and Jaina don’t even catch this immediately, sometimes, falling easily into old habits. It’s jarring, realizing this every time, remembering abruptly that she is dead, that she’s been dead, that she really has no reason and no right to be here. She no longer has any purpose at all, and she’s terrified.

When they finally reach the docks, she doesn’t quite feel as though she’s actually there, everything sort of dim and far away, as if she were just some lost spirit merely spectating. The ship pulls in, and standing there at the front of the crowd, at the very end of the docks, are Aegwinn and Pained. The night elf is scowling frustratedly, but not at her, she knows. If anything, this is merely the expression of her aggravation and despair of not being able to protect her in her time of need. She’s probably been doing this for a long time, Jaina realizes, and just feels guilt wash over her anew.

Aegwinn takes one look at her and says, “Oh, child, what have they done to you?”

Jaina cannot give her an answer.

After they’ve been welcomed and settled in, Jaina goes up to her chambers for the first time in months. There’s hardly any dust; they’d been keeping it clean for her. She’s not sure what actually sets her off, whether it’s the thoughtful consideration that had been put into this simple act of cleaning, expecting her return, or if it’s anything and everything else, but when she sits on her bed, she finds that she can’t get back up. She just stares out the window overlooking the sea, hears gulls wailing in the distances, and when Aegwinn sits down beside her, she suddenly finds herself weeping, the ugly, tearless sobs racking her body while the old sorceress comforts in what ways she can. Finally burnt out, she falls asleep, with no thought as to whether she’ll wake up again.

\---

Jaina does wake up the next day. She wakes up the next day, and the next day, and the next day, and soon the fear of not waking up whenever she closes her eyes is merely that- a fear. Having a regular sense of time again is. Strange. But she wakes up, she gets dressed, she goes about her day, comes back, gets ready for bed, and then sleeps. Having people to remind her of this, helps, she supposes, Pained now constantly close behind and telling her to sleep and eat and passively bullying her into doing so if she doesn’t. It’s odd, because she didn’t think that she would have to do either of those things anymore, but apparently, the tradeoff for not being in contact with a constant font of magic power actively concentrating on keeping her up, eating and sleeping became a must to uphold the magic that was keeping her functioning.

According to the letter she received from Sylvanas, this is normal. It had taken her some getting used to, as well. The letter had arrived a few days after she had returned and unfortunately after a dizzy spell and hours of feeling weak and sluggish caused her to fall over. It seems so small and ridiculous a thing to be brought down by, she who swallowed storms whole, but it’s somehow a comfort to know that “undead” did not mean “immortal,” that she did not become a demi-deity as she feared.

The letter is not the only one, though they certainly are all unexpected; she still finds it difficult to believe that her return should warrant such a reaction. Still, besides Sylvanas’ oddly formal and clinical letter (still embarrassed, Jaina is sure), there are several more from various Horde and Alliance leaders, dignitaries, and ambassadors. Thrall and Varian ask how she’s been, Thrall writing both for himself and for Garrosh who never got around to learning how to write Common, and Varian writing on Anduin’s behalf as well as his own.

Thrall asks, _How are you?_ Varian says, _Anduin misses you._ Both say, _please come visit, please write back,_ and Jaina’s throat his too warm and too tight and she is undeserving of this.

Velen sends his condolences, so does Cairne and Vol’jin and Tyrande, and there is one remaining letter that she is afraid to open, one with the seal of Kul Tiras. She hasn’t spoken with her brother in years, not since their father died under her consent. She has no idea what he could possibly say to her. She puts off opening it for days and days, sitting innocuously on her writing desk and always right in the corner of her eye, until finally, trembling, she opens it.

It’s awkward and stilted, and he has no idea of where to start, but neither does she. The familiarity of Tandred’s clean cursive is enough, she thinks. He wants to try to mend things over. She’ll try, too. Their mother is dead, their father is dead, their brother is dead, and she’s dead, too, but they’re the only family each other’s got. She’ll try, if only for that.

While she was away, her advisors apparently elected a council to rule in her absence. Lorena was merely head of the military; there were also representatives for tradesmen, for mages, and for the common people. She recognizes all of them, dearly, and they recognize her, but when they state their intentions of putting her back in place as their proper ruler, she declines. She no longer feels herself fit to rule, and besides that, the noticeable increase in the number of Alliance banners around the city in place of the banners for Theramore herself make her a bit uncomfortable knowing that her city was strong-armed fully back into the Alliance in her absence. They were probably just doing what they thought they had to, but she’s not sure she could stand by and allow her city to be forced into conflict with Orgrimmar because the other factions of the Alliance decided that they needed to use her port for their own ends. They understand, though sadly, and offer to give her a position as an advisor instead, alongside Aegwinn who somehow narrowly dodged being elected as the mage representative. She can do this much, she thinks; be a neutral party, the voice of reason who speaks only for Theramore and its best interests. Her word will be valued greatly, if nothing else.

Still, there’s a sense of restlessness she can’t quite rid herself of, a sense that she’s not supposed to be here, even though everyone seems to be just short of falling over themselves to make sure that she feels right at home. Weeks pass, months pass, and it still won’t leave her.

News of the Ashen Verdict’s efforts come in every once in a while, though there’s never really anything big. They’re still working on the citadel, they’re still working on Northrend in general, and she can’t help but be a bit disappointed in what she hears. Small victories, and all that, yes, but they still have apparently made no headway on tracking down the last of the cult, and the thought of this nags at her insistently. She knows very well what they are capable of, what they could do should no one stop them. Deathwhisper’s phylactery might have been dealt with, but Kel’thuzad’s is still unaccounted for, and Kel’thuzad alone would be enough to revive the cult.

It starts as a vague whim and turns into her hastily packing things into a bag in the middle of the night while Pained is asleep in the chair next to her bed, and she is only stopped by Aegwinn saying, seemingly coming nothing:

“Where do you think you’re going?”

She freezes, looking over her shoulder as Aegwinn materializes from the shadows. Old yes, and weaker than she once was, yet still a threat, still a witch, like her.

“Now, do you really think that leaving in the middle of the night without telling anyone is such a great idea after you were gone for so long?” she says, half-scolding, half-laughing, brows drawn together and the corners of her mouth drawn up.

“…no,” Jaina admits quietly. Aegwinn sighs. Pained begins to stir, and they both go silent in an instant, waiting. Pained goes still again soon enough.

“If you want to leave, then that’s all well and good,” she starts. “But don’t think you can get away with just taking off without some protest from us,” she continues, chuckling.

“You’re alright with me leaving?” Jaina asks.

“No, not at all,” Aegwinn replies bluntly. “We just got you back, of course I’m not alright with you leaving again. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to stand by you and help you when you need it. You do what you feel is right. I’ll only stop you if I think you’re going to hurt yourself.”

“And this?”

“Stupid, definitely,” the old witch hums. “But nothing that could hurt you, really. You want to go after the cult, right?” Jaina nods.

“I thought so,” she confirms. “I can’t stop you here, really, but I do ask that you at least tell everyone where you’re going, at least for their sake.” Jaina does not answer for a few moments.

“Alright,” she relents. Aegwinn’s furious smirk spreads into something soft and genuine, placated.

Jaina leaves a few days later, and though she leaves by herself, she knows that she is not truly alone, that there is a place for her to return to when she is done.

\---

The forest is dark and you are cold.

The cottage is suspiciously quiet as you approach it; seemingly abandoned, but no animals will come near. There is no evidence of anything coming near- moss creeps up the side of its stone walls and onto the thatched roof, but this is the only sign of life that has left its mark here. If it had been truly abandoned, then the fauna would have reclaimed it for the forest. It was too good a shelter to pass up. In any case, this is the right one, you’re sure.

There is a single window within sight- there are others but the cottage is rather small and you are currently only seeing it from the front. Experimentally, you peer through the dusty, dirty glass, and sees dark, vague shapes that could possibly be a kitchen. There is woodstove in the corner, maybe, with a stack of firewood close by, and there is the blurry outline of a simple wooden table and chairs. However, when you open the cottage door, this is not what you see at all, though it is what you expected. This is, after all, a witch’s house, even if you are the only witch here.

You step through the door, icy winds coming to meet you as you enter. You close the door behind you. This is where you start; it is only natural that it be in a cottage in the woods, in a witch’s house. You are, after all, a witch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> holyyyyy shit thank you for sticking with me all throughout this ;;;  
> this is easily the longest thing I've ever written holy fuckin shit please lemme know what you think
> 
> ps I am sorry for all of the lowkey shipping between thrall jaina and garrosh I was trying so hard not to be trash but I jjust kept falling into the pit pls forgive me I am very sad and very gay ;;;;;;


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